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I intend this to be a short post, let’s see how I do. Basically, here, I’ll write on how to make bruteforcing go from “dumb” to “obsolete”. I’ll assume you know what bruteforcing is, and already have a notion of what makes passwords “strong” (harder to crack). For that, I’ll tell you guys how I make my passwords. They all look something like this: 1l!k#v)dk$$ndP!3

Think that’s hard to remember? It’s not. Let’s get started:

Come up with a short passphrase. Let’s use “try to crack me”. We won’t be needing spaces, so let’s just use “trytocrackme”. This would be tough to crack using bruteforce already, but hey, let’s make it hard for quantum computers :P

1. Switch CAPS LOCK on.

 

2. Write out your password in 1337 language (piece of cake, right?). Ours looks like this:

7RY70CR4CKM3

 

3. Hold down the SHIFT key and type it again, in leet language:

&ry&)cr$ckm#

 

4. This is pretty nice already, but we wanna have some numbers and upper case letters, right? So this is where it becomes customizable. Here, I’ll use the same algorithm I used for the example-password (which, by the way, is equivalent to “i like vodka and pie”). Here, I let go of the SHIFT key at the FIRST and LAST occurrencies of algarisms in my leet-translated passphrase. I also let go of it at the LAST occurrence of a letter. You can come up to any fixed combination of these. By applying the one above, our password would finally look like this:

7ry&)cr$ckM3

 

And that’s that. Oh yeah, you probably know this, but I can’t not say it: DON’T RECYCLE PASSWORDS. I was amazed at how many people who actually work with computers do this.

eof