Passwords - how do you manage them all?

titchard said:
I usually have 3 different type of password - going up in "layers" of security

Layer ONE - basic sites that are not that big a deal, blog commenting etc, not to complex with a few numbers switched in and out.

Layer TWO - online shopping which are longer and more complex.

Layer THREE - saved for banking and email - the longest and most complex.

Rich
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I use some thing along these lines too although with some varients for one reason or another.

Tend to keep them all in a spreadsheet on a truecrypt partition.
 
i have all my passwords in a nice little .txt file called passwords.txt

which is put in a .7z archive with a 20 character passwords (which i remember) :p
 
Here is my way:

Look at your keyboard layout (mine is 1qaz 2wsx 3edc 4rfv 5tgb 6yhn 7ujm 8ik, 9ol. 0p;/)

Think of a word thats personal to you (we will say brother in this example) now from the keyboard use the numbers that related to the letter of the word you are typing. (in this case brother) so it would be:

5 4 9 5 6 3 4
b r o t h e r

this makes it easier for really long passwords like your full name (example jonathandavies)

7-9-6-1-5-6-1-6-3-1-4-8-3-2
j-o-n-a-t-h-a-n-d-a-v-i-e-s

give it a whirl ;)
 
codec said:
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Interesting idea, I might give that a go, even just shifting up the letters by one row would work quite well, jonathandavies becomes u9hq5yqheqf83w. It's a pain at uni as we have to change passwords every 3 months and it can't contain any word in a dictionary and can't have a sequence off 3 letters in common with any of your previous passwords IIRC. I spend ages trying to come up with new passwords. I may use that method in future :D
 
i will use one password for every site, but then include 2 characters for the website i am using it for at a place in the password, so e.g. say password is computer, and i'm registering for facebook, then password is, compfauter, registering for overclockers, then compovuter. easy to remember as it's only one password and just the characters of the site and where they go, instead could use first and last, middle 2, place them as beginning end etc. this works best with a random made up word like heamiordo

this way atleast if someone finds one password they only have one and not all.
 
I use KeePass with an insanely long master passphrase.
Keepass runs on most platforms and the keyfiles work on all too.

I generally use a few different 'easy to recall' nicks/passwords for stuff like internet forums though.
 
Just a piece of advice for those of you that have passwords written down, what I recommend doing is adding some characters either side, so if anyone else gets hold of it, they probably won't be able to get the actual password anyway, whereas it will jog your memory and you will figure out which characters to discard. PIN numbers in particular should never be written down in plain text, as a 4 digit number stands out like a sore thumb - if you really must write it down, disguise it as a phone number or similar.
 
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