Choosing Strong Passwords

Written by Kenneth Crowder

Monday, 11 January 2010 09:06

Strong passwords are important. A strong password should contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. The use of a child's name or common dictionary words is not advised and can easily be fooled. If you have problems remembering cryptic passwords, consider using character substitutions to make bad passwords at least decent passwords. Following is an example of how that works.

Let's say you're going to use someone's name for a password. Even though this is very common, it's a bad idea. When people do this, they typically choose a name that anyone who has met them for more than five minutes would figure out. A lot of parents like to use their child's name. We'll be the first to admit having done it before. For our example, we are going to use the name of my roommate years ago after college. His name is Darin Newby.

Although a good person, DarinNewby is a horrible password. We can strengthen this password by substituting certain letters with numbers or symbols. Granted, this is not as secure as a completely cryptic password, but it is better than only using letters. Just by substituting the vowels, we can come up with a password like D@r!nN3wby. That's a much better password and would be much harder to guess. Ideally, you want to have at least one letter, number, and symbol in your password.

To generate strong, random passwords, we like to use this website called http://www.goodpassword.com.

It gives you lots of options for password length, character types, and even the option to exclude characters that can be confused with other characters.

If you or your company doesn't already have a policy to change passwords on a regular basis, such a policy should be strongly considered.

Excert above used with permission

Reference: Ken Crowder and Ron Severdia, Using Joomla. O'Reilly Media, California 2010, Pages 323-324

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