Of course I’m not asking you to give away your passwords. But for those of you who have so many, how do you keep track of them all? Do you use any unique methods?
I know many people struggle between having something that’s easy to remember and something that’s easy to guess. If you keep a note with your passwords on it, for example, it can be stolen, lost, or destroyed, or if you make them according to a pattern that’s easy to remember, the wrong people might find them easier to guess.
I don’t. Bitwarden and that’s it.
I only remember one password, the one to my password manager.
Password manager
KeePassXC/DX.
Nice try
Bitwarden
Keepassxc remembers for me.
For cases where I may not have access to a password manager, I have a standard procedure where I’ll take the website url, add a fixed salt word, and run it through a hash function.
Either this is a common algorithm or you might be my friend who also does this.
i have difficult & long unique passwords for each of the important things (emails, bank, any official gov or edu sites etc.) that i keep on a piece of paper in my notebook (with a few backup copies). And i also have 3 degrees of difficulty for my other passwords that i use like this: easy “i could not care less if this account got hacked, in fact i know this password has been leaked in plain text before so whatever”, medium “i’d kinda suck if this got hacked but ultimately it’d not cause major issues”, hard “i do not want this to be hacked”
Before password managers I used to come up with a phrase or nonsense word that was personally significant to me, or an inside joke. Some sort of “catch phrase” that would only make sense to me and maybe my closest friends. Sometimes just an initialism of something I’d know, like my ex-gf Angie (not her real name) had a gap in her teeth, so I’d tell my friends “Angie’s got a gap in her teeth so my dick’s gots to fit!” and so my password would be “Agagihtsmdg2f!”
I use a hardware password manager that connects over USB or bluetooth for most things. The few things that I use often I have a system for, and that system is popular culture.
Love “The Prisoner of Azkaban”? Initialize it, and add the publish date some where: HP&TPoA|1999
Starship troopers fan? Initialize a memorable quote. “The enemy can not push a button… if you disable his hand. Medic!”: Tecnpab…iydhh.M! Need numbers? Find a quote with numbers, or add the release year, or the number of times you watched it that one weekend where you and a friend watched it 32 times.
Like TV shows more? How about the fourth episode of family guy: S1-MindOverMuder-E4.
Metal Fan? I do love track three off of Metallica’s 1983 album: #3|Motorbreath-1983
Etc.
This is pretty much what I used to do before I got a password manager. Only difference is I would take that short phrase and randomly drop letters or replace them with numbers or symbols, and also random capitalization. Then I’d just practice typing it for 5 minutes until it was muscle memory. After about a week, I could no longer consciously remember the specifics of the password, just the key phrase and the associated muscle memory.
I have a friend who resets his passwords whenever he connects. So he only remembers one password, that of his email. He claims it’s safer this way.
I have four passwords I memorize: my password manager, my main email, my work login, and a throw away password for stuff that doesn’t matter too much (signing up for giveaways, throw away social media accounts, etc). For everything else I have the password manager create some twenty character monstrosity.
The four memorized ones are all nine letter words with numbers and symbols replacing letters usually always including a comma somewhere as I heard once that a comma makes a password hardet to crack (but, now thinking about it, I don’t know where I heard that and it sounds like a myth).
I used to have a couple of letters from the site/service followed by an obscure dialectal word that’s not found in dictionaries with a few characters replaced by numbers and symbols. Those two letters kind of work like salting to keep every hash of my password unique.
Now I just do bitwarden.
