Strong password folder: Do's & Don'ts
Most of us don't have much talent for choosing passwords, while a difficult or long combination of words, numbers, and symbols often scares us as we are certain we will forget it.
But this may not be as difficult as we think, if we practice a little. To prove this, two scientists, Microsoft researcher Stuart Schrechter and Joseph Bono from Princeton University, conducted an experiment and tried to see if people could memorize a very difficult 56-digit password.
For this reason, theyused the SRS (Spaced Repetition System) technique, which uses increasing time intervals to determine whether something has been memorized.
The researchers recruited people from an Amazon platform to take a series of distraction tests. At least, that's what they were told, since what they were really looking at was how connected the users were to the test.
What was happening was this: The program, every time the log in prompt appeared on the screen, prompted the user to type a series of words or letters. Each time the prompt appeared on the screen, it took an increasingly long time for the sequence of characters to appear. So, users started typing the sequence from memory.
Over 10 days, the sequence of letters and words became longer and longer, until the user had to type 12 random letters or 6 random words to start the test.
After an average of 36 attempts, 94% of those tested were able to type passwords on their own, while after three days, 88% still remembered the password sequence.
"The dimension of human memory that has not been explored with codes is great. Human memory will surprise you," said Joseph Bono, one of the two researchers.
What's up with the hackers?
However, someone's ability to remember long passwords is not enough to prevent hackers from invading their information.
A recent study showed that passwords like “mnbvcxz”, “qaz2wsx” and “adgjmptw” can be “cracked” in seconds, while even adding numbers to them doesn’t help much.
In an experiment conducted in 2013 on behalf of a technology site, a team of hackers managed to "crack" more than 14,800 passwords from a list of 16,449.
The success rate for each hacker ranged from 62% to 90%, while the one who cracked 90% of the passwords took less than an hour.
It is worth noting that during this experiment, the hackers also managed to "crack" the 16-digit code "qeadzcwrsfxv1331".
How to choose a password and what to avoid
Words like “baseball” and “football” are in the top 10 worst passwords. Birthdays and dates are easy to guess, as are common names.
Experts advise using 8 mixed character types in as random an order as possible. They also say that short phrases or words with other characters in between, but which are not related to each other, are easy to remember and offer a good margin of security.
Finally, they emphasize that it would be best to use different passwords for each page we use.
Source: techit.gr
