Ask Lemmy

Password manager

In my experience the best way to remember passwords is to.... Get a password manager

I don't. Bitwarden and that's it.

Like other have said, Bitwarden.

But I also would like to add: I use the Emergency Access feature in case of forgotten master password.

You basically set up another account and do a sort of "public key exchange handshake" with your main account. Then your secondary account becomes a way to recover your main account.

You can store the credentials to secondary account in plain text on a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere you have a habit of accessing (so you don't forget where you put it). Its doesn't matter if a snooping family member saw those credentials, theres a pre-set timer that needs to expire before access is granted. If I saw that timer being triggered, I'd know someone had been snooping, and I can just click deny access from my main account.

So if you somehow forget your main password, you find the paper with your secondary account and use it to request access to your primary account. And well you'd have to wait out the timer, but its better than losing your vault forever and having to reset every password.

I only remember one password, the one to my password manager.

I try to use passwords that look like sentences. For example you could "SpotifyIsAwesome!2024". Easy to remember, hard to crack

I have hundreds of passwords, there’s no way I could manage that without a password manager.

1Password isn’t terrible, it’s pretty intuitive.

Bitwarden is another popular option.

Using the same (or similar) passwords for multiple things is a really bad idea.

KeePassXC/DX.

Bitwarden and be done.

I have a friend who resets his passwords whenever he connects. So he only remembers one password, that of his email. He claims it's safer this way.

For passwords you have to keep in your head, diceware. Surprised it’s not already mentioned! Basically you roll dice to choose words from a long wordlist until you have 6 or 7 words.

Human brains are good at remembering words. It’s way easier to remember a password that looks like:

grandson estimator virtuous scabbed poet parasitic

than it is to remember a random character string.

Obligatory XKCD

I use passphrases from movies of shows that I like. Then add a special symbol and a number that I like.

Thanks for nothing you useless reptile!61

This has 100.54 bits of entropy. I consider anything above 60 sufficient enough

Nice try

I have four passwords I memorize: my password manager, my main email, my work login, and a throw away password for stuff that doesn't matter too much (signing up for giveaways, throw away social media accounts, etc). For everything else I have the password manager create some twenty character monstrosity.

The four memorized ones are all nine letter words with numbers and symbols replacing letters usually always including a comma somewhere as I heard once that a comma makes a password hardet to crack (but, now thinking about it, I don't know where I heard that and it sounds like a myth).

Keepassxc remembers for me.

Bitwarden

I used to have a couple of letters from the site/service followed by an obscure dialectal word that's not found in dictionaries with a few characters replaced by numbers and symbols. Those two letters kind of work like salting to keep every hash of my password unique.

Now I just do bitwarden.

i have difficult & long unique passwords for each of the important things (emails, bank, any official gov or edu sites etc.) that i keep on a piece of paper in my notebook (with a few backup copies). And i also have 3 degrees of difficulty for my other passwords that i use like this: easy "i could not care less if this account got hacked, in fact i know this password has been leaked in plain text before so whatever", medium "i'd kinda suck if this got hacked but ultimately it'd not cause major issues", hard "i do not want this to be hacked"

For cases where I may not have access to a password manager, I have a standard procedure where I'll take the website url, add a fixed salt word, and run it through a hash function.

2 ways

1 password manager

2. I use them very often. I have a bunch of different yes complex passwords that I’m using repeatedly throughout the day so brute force rote memory….

But yeah. Password manager

hunter3 for everything.

They're all the same-ish.

Let's say my password is Token, but spelled like t0k3||

I would attach something related to the site on it, so if the site is lemmy for example, the password would be like

t0k3||Addictedtosurfing

If the site is Amazon something like

t0k3||Thanksformyfavoritejob

I called it "lock and key" style and I'd change the beginning part, the "lock", once a year.

So next year it'll be ef|=027Addictedtosurfing

These are examples lol

I only try to remember two passwords. My email password and my password manager password. The rest and random gobbledy gook.

I use postal codes, street names and house numbers of addresses where I previously lived. They contain numbers and capital letters, are random for anyone else, but in doubt I can always look them up.

Before password managers I used to come up with a phrase or nonsense word that was personally significant to me, or an inside joke. Some sort of “catch phrase” that would only make sense to me and maybe my closest friends. Sometimes just an initialism of something I’d know, like my ex-gf Angie (not her real name) had a gap in her teeth, so I’d tell my friends “Angie’s got a gap in her teeth so my dick’s gots to fit!” and so my password would be “Agagihtsmdg2f!”

My passwords are unfortunately very... "patterned". Makes remembering them easier though.

I use a hardware password manager that connects over USB or bluetooth for most things. The few things that I use often I have a system for, and that system is popular culture.

Love "The Prisoner of Azkaban"? Initialize it, and add the publish date some where: HP&TPoA|1999

Starship troopers fan? Initialize a memorable quote. "The enemy can not push a button... if you disable his hand. Medic!": Tecnpab...iydhh.M! Need numbers? Find a quote with numbers, or add the release year, or the number of times you watched it that one weekend where you and a friend watched it 32 times.

Like TV shows more? How about the fourth episode of family guy: S1-MindOverMuder-E4.

Metal Fan? I do love track three off of Metallica's 1983 album: #3|Motorbreath-1983

Etc.

I remember them two characters at a time.

Theres a couple of passwords I remember, like for logging on my PC and into my password manager

I only need a couple “real” passwords. They are long, complex, and backed by 2fa

Historically I re-used things from personal history. I know I shouldn’t but they’re easier to remember since I already memorized them. Usually they’re not public data, more like

• my first PIN of my first ever bank card is now additional authentication for my app with my current bank
• one password is the name and IP (with substitutions) of one of my favorite servers from a job 15 years ago when I ran my own lab
• I gotta admit, I still have some trivial passwords for things that seem trivial

But my passwords are mostly generated (and the password to that is complex and unique, plus requires additional Auth). Anything from the last couple years also has a unique generated email

My company is pretty serious about such things: I have generated passwords, two separate 2fa apps and a yubikey. Plus they have some annoying shit on the laptop that is sometimes annoying

For the work passwords I have to remember and cannot always access a password manager, I use pass phrases instead. Statistically, 3 random, non-similar words, are more secure than normal passwords. Changing random letters to symbols and capitalizing can further improve the security. For instance...

• Stove glob3 hamst#r
• pants Stuffin& quote
• z1ptie float beet$l