Bruce Schneier’s Advice for Managing Passwords

Security expert Bruce Schneier shares a list of do’s and don’t’s for passwords (and in a show of refreshing honesty, admits that he regularly breaks seven of his own the rules; that’s pretty extreme given that the list contains only ten items).

I routinely break four or five of the rules, but I won’t tell you which ones. I assume that I get bonus points for that. I thought about password-protecting this post to increase my security score, but, to be honest, I don’t know how to do that.

I will tell you that I use a password manager application. It’s not perfect, but it’s served me well over the years. I have to keep track of around 300 passwords for myself and my clients, and an app like this is absolutely essential for me*.

Although, now that I think about it, I really should be able to remember all of them without assistance, since I use nothing other than “mypassword.” 😉

*Update (2022): I now use a password manager called Keeper. It’s invaluable. Even though I no longer have to track passwords for clients, I still use it daily for personal business. I recommend it highly.

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4 comments

  1. So, you’re saying I shouldn’t use my credit card number as a password? hmmm…
    I use a password I invented years ago for most websites that don’t contain anything personal about me. A lot of these sites (newspaper sites, for example) use a non-working email address.
    One article I read had what I thought was a great way of generating passwords – use a sentence you can remember and the password is the first (or last) letter of each word.
    For example – Fireant Gazette must be read daily = fgmbrd or tetedy.

  2. No, you shouldn’t use your cc number as a password, but you SHOULD provide it to me as a password. That’s all I’ll use if for. Honest.
    The mnemonic approach to passwords that you mention is highly recommended. I have a particularly critical PW that’s 14 characters in length, and I can easily remember it because of what it’s tied to.
    However, I’m afraid my mind would never allow me to use the *last* letter of words in a sentence!

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