On Thu, 5 Dec 2013, obsd, cgi wrote: > So I know the rule.. only remember a few very very long passwords (ex.: > based on several words and a few special chars), and keep the rest of the > passwords in a password manager (those aren't remembered and extreme long).
I'm not at all convinced that adding any special characters will accomplish much to a good password. When you are just using short passwords, they may be of help by expanding the number of characters used in the password. If you choose your password chacters from lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers, and a selection of 8 punctuation marks, then you would have a grand total of 70 characters. If the password is 8 characters long, then that would be 70^8 different passwords that could be generated. That is, 5.7648 * 10^14 possible passwords. Suppose that you instead choose five words at random from a dictionary of 10,000 entries. Then that would be 10000^5 or 10^20 possible passwords without having to resort to tricks that make it harder to remember the password. My best passwords are nonsense sentences about 80 to 100 characters long. For example: > There are no goldfish in the story of the three little wolves and the > big bad piglet. Eric
