It's no surprise that we've mentioned this before, how to create a secure password that you can remember. But, I want to share a quick tip that has helped me create a strong password that I will be able to remember for aeons. (Well, maybe decades, but that's good enough.)
Think of a song that you know the lyrics to pretty well. It helps if it has a number in it. Here are some examples:
- December '63 by The Four Seasons
- Eight Days a Week by The Beatles
- 16 Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford
Creating the Password
The way to approach the password is as a hybrid acronym. (I say hybrid because you should spell out at least one of the words so that it's that much more difficult to guess.) So, let's take 16 Tons as an example. You know the lyrics, "You load 16 tons and what do you get?" etc. So, what does that look like as a strong password? How about "Yl16tons&wdyg?" ? That looks pretty strong to me, but let's see what 1Password's strength meter says:
Excellent is really good for a master password! So, now we have a 14 character password with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. And, it's going to be easy for me to remember. All I have to do is sing the song in my head.
You might prefer to avoid ambiguous characters like l (ell), 1 (one), I (capital i), o (oh), and 0 (zero), but for a password that you created, I don't think this is as much a problem as when using generated passwords. If that's the case, choose another song!
That's all for this quick tip. Now, go and create a strong, memorable master password!
