An interesting article by Bruce Schneier in the Guardian a few weeks ago on selecting secure passwords to thwart password guessing software. His key piece of advice is to take a sentence and turn it into a password. “Something like “This little piggy went to market” might become “tlpWENT2m”. And so this has had me off thinking about acronyms, aide memoires and mnemonics that could be used to help me create more useful, or less helpful passwords. This occurred to me when I went to register for Spotify, a free music service that serves you ads along with your music. Spotify’s registration page has a cute bar graph that tells you, as you type it in, the security rating of your chosen password; my usual password scored a ‘secure’ while ‘tlpWENT2m’ scored a ‘very secure. Shucks – it works.
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