Managing the Ever Increasing Stack of Passwords

As per recent analysis 73 percent people use same password for accessing multiple sites, average number of characters used in a password is 6 and it takes around 3 minutes to crack an average password.

Remembering passwords is becoming increasingly difficult with ever increasing online functions and tasks. The increased consumer inclination/confidence towards online shopping/banking/travel etc has lead to generation of a heap of passwords. On the professional front as most offices are already computerized you have another set of passwords to remember, such as the Windows network logon, official e-mail account, your website's FTP password, online passwords (like website member account), etc. etc. etc. The list is endless. From office to home to travel you need them all the time. Not only you need to remember passwords but you are need to keep them strong and change from time to time.

Some use a common password for access to different systems but it has the risk that if the common password is hacked then all the resources can be hacked from e-mail to bank account. So while it is a recommendable practice to keep unique password for accessing each system, it again leaves us with the difficult task of managing plethora of passwords.

Using Password Managers

One of the solutions to this problem is the use of password manager applications such as KeePass, and LastPass. KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). LastPass is another password manager which offers free as well as paid services for individual and enterprise password management solutions.  

Using a Private Pattern

The method of relying on another application/password manager is good but what about the cases when the system is down/unavailable? Or what about cases when the password to the password manager is compromised? Any data that is stored no matter how strong is the encryption or how safe is the place is vulnerable. Till date human brain is the safest place to store data if we can pull it out accurately when needed.

A solution to this problem is creating a pattern for generating unique passwords for each site. All we need to remember is the pattern for generating unique passwords. An example of a pattern used/suggested by a leading security expert is to split the pattern into two parts. First component would be the fixed and the second component is dependent of the domain name of the site you are accessing.

It is important to have the first/fixed part of 7 to 8 characters as complex as you can remember for example 1BeEradE

Now once you have decided on the fixed part, all you need to do is create a pattern based on the domain name of the site to be accessed. Pattern can be of your choice for example to increment or decrement first three or last three characters of the domain name of the site to be accessed. Let us say we need to access Flipkart.com and our pattern is to pick the next letter to the first three characters of the site name. So our password for Flipkart.com will be 1BeEradEgmj. Our password for snapdeal.com will be 1BeEradEtob.

Using this technique we can remember the passwords to any site that we access as all we need to remember is ONE fixed password and a secret pattern.  Wish you a Happy and a safe Browsing!