How to create a strong yet memorable password.

We're often told 'make sure you use a good password'. When we change our passwords at work we're often forced to add random characters into it to make it more complicated. This can have a detrimental effect on how how easy it is to remember. For a rant on the importance of passwords being memorable see this. This post is the second of a short series covering various areas of password management and related issues, and is going to cover a simple method for devising strong yet memorable passwords.

So how do we come up with a password which is memorable, and really hard to guess. We need to be sure it's a reasonable length, contains a mix both small and capital letters, numbers (ideally) and non alpha-numberic characters to make it had to guess. Unfortunately passwords like lk^7*Sn7@'h& are hard to guess, but also hard to remember..

We tend to remember things we associate images, sounds, feelings, taste, touch etc with, rather than lists of characters. Lines in songs, poems, phrases with films, headlines in newspapers stick with us because of an image we form in our minds, which we find easy to recall.

Take the time at the end of 'Back to the Future' when the Doc Brown comes back in the now flying DeLorian, and tells Marty that they need to go to the future. When told the road isn't long enough to get to 88Mph, who can forget the Doc dropping down his sunglasses and saying 'Roads, where we're going, we don't need roads!'.

Memorable right? If you weren't a fan of 'back to the future', take a song lyric you like, or line from a film/poem/court judgement you enjoyed, and write it down capitalized and punctuated.

Roads, where we're going, we don't need roads!

Lets take the first character from each word, and the punctuation, and we get :

R,wwg,wdnr!

So memorable that you will never need to write it down, and almost impossible to guess. If your system also want's a number, then either substitute, or add one.. So we could make it R,wwg,wdnr1 .

I've used this system for years, and don't have to write down my password to remember it, and have never had a problem with 'password to simple' complaints from the operating system.

Comments, as always, are welcome!