Selecting Good Passwords

Selecting Good Passwords

Rationale

The object when choosing a password is to make it as difficult as possible for a cracker to make educated guesses about what you've chosen. This leaves him no alternative but a brute-force search, trying every possible combination of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A search of this sort, even conducted on a machine that could try one million passwords per second (most machines can try less than one hundred per second), would require, on the average, over one hundred years to complete.

What Not to Use

What to Use

Method to Choose Secure and Easy to Remember Passwords

Excerpts from
IMPROVING THE SECURITY OF YOUR UNIX SYSTEM
David A. Curry, Systems Programmer
Information and Telecommunications Sciences and
Technology Division
ITSTD-721-FR-90-21