Comment on LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach
jay2@beehaw.org 1 week agoIt is possible. I have 78 unique passphrases. You only need to train your brain and not turn it over to a machine.
What composition though? I’ve got well over 100 that are 20+ characters including special characters. I can’t believe this is possible without use of words or something easily guessed.
I do have a few passwords I keep to myself, and even with my method of taking the first letter from a key phrase or set of song lyrics and switching most to leet speak, I still don’t think I could possibly remember more than a dozen reliably.
You can actually generate high entropy passphrases by chaining random words together. You just need to make sure the phrases are actually random and not just whatever comes to your head at the moment.
Naturally, words help with memorization, but memorizing hundreds of these is impractical at best, especially because long-term memory for infrequently used accounts is subject to “bit rot”.
How many characters are we talking, though? I’ve had passwords as limiting as 16 characters for some services (unfortunately)… that seems small to me for generating real randomness with passphrases.
That said, fair enough, but as someone who has administered a network before, I would never, ever want my users relying on their brain… the security from a pass manager is practically going to be way better than the standard practices of an average user without one. IMO.
But hey, color me impressed, honestly.
The entropy stems from the words, not characters. With random words and no repetition, you have C(n, k) combinations (or n^k with repetition), where n is your dictionary size and k is the number of words you chain together. These passwords tend to be longer, but not by much. A big enough dictionary can yield some pretty high entropy with only a few words.
I’ve had passwords as limiting as 16 characters for some services (unfortunately)…
16 characters is hardly enough for random characters unless you include Unicode (which rarely works for those same services that usually have shitty implementations).
Not much can be done there, sadly. You’re lucky if they even hash their passwords anyway - you’ll probably just get your password emailed to you if you click “forgot password” like it’s 2003.
I would never, ever want my users relying on their brain…
I never would either. People should just use a password manager. I was just mentioning an alternative that generated more memorable passphrases, but I wouldn’t advocate for it over random high-entropy strings saved in a password manager.
Fifrok@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Sure if it’s possible for you then it must be possible for everyone 😐. I’m sure that this will work for my ass. It’s not like I know from experience that I will forget anything of importance if I don’t write it down.
I keep a journal and a commonplace book (and a self hosted password manager) to remember anything of importance for no reason at all, silly me should have just remembered it. I just need to pull myself up by my bootstraps and stop being lazy duh.
jay2@beehaw.org 1 week ago
You can do it. That’s my point. Yes it takes time. Yes it takes patience. Yes it takes practice. Your brain is an incredible machine capable of so many things, much more by far than a computer. Computers are chunks of silicon. They do basic addition. They just do it so much quicker is all. Yours is superior. Keep it exercised.
I do keep a cheat sheet of clues. Things that I write to remind me of the actual phrase, but I rarely need it. Make a point to memorize 10 a week. Custom photo screensavers (I use jpeg Saver 5.3 by Goat 1000) are great for flash cards. I find writing it out to be the best way to learn, but reading is my second, and listening is third (but rather poor considering I lose focus and miss bits). Try to learn how you learn best and exploit that. I used to have an old braintest that was incredibly accurate. It would tell you whether you were more inclined for audio or visual learning. It also defined your brains inclination to be left hemispheric or right hemispheric in its dominance. It was called brainworks. I think it ran on windows 95. For sure Windows 98SE.
Honestly, a lot of the ones I ended up needing to lookup or reset were the ones that are restricted with a maximum length and I cant use an entire phrase. That just jambs up my plumbing, if you know what I mean.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
I can’t tell if you are self deluded or really are an interesting case. I do question using a screensaver to help memorise a password rather than a password manager.