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.

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 days ago

      I have Bitwarden set up with a feature called Emergency Access. The credentials to access that is just stores in plain text on a piece of paper in a drawer that I frequently use. If I ever forget my master password, I pull out the paper and use the Emergency Access feature, and start the timer, I set it at one or two weeks.

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 days ago

    Like other have said, Bitwarden.

    But I also would like to add: I use the Emergency Access feature in case of forgotten master password.

    You basically set up another account and do a sort of “public key exchange handshake” with your main account. Then your secondary account becomes a way to recover your main account.

    You can store the credentials to secondary account in plain text on a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere you have a habit of accessing (so you don’t forget where you put it). Its doesn’t matter if a snooping family member saw those credentials, theres a pre-set timer that needs to expire before access is granted. If I saw that timer being triggered, I’d know someone had been snooping, and I can just click deny access from my main account.

    So if you somehow forget your main password, you find the paper with your secondary account and use it to request access to your primary account. And well you’d have to wait out the timer, but its better than losing your vault forever and having to reset every password.

  • WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I have hundreds of passwords, there’s no way I could manage that without a password manager.

    1Password isn’t terrible, it’s pretty intuitive.

    Bitwarden is another popular option.

    Using the same (or similar) passwords for multiple things is a really bad idea.

  • ByteMe@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I try to use passwords that look like sentences. For example you could “SpotifyIsAwesome!2024”. Easy to remember, hard to crack

  • Nadru@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    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.

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Theres… There’s something to it, I guess. Make sure your email is secure, and if not even you know your password, how can someone else. Christ, it sounds like a massive pain in the ass, though.

  • traches@sh.itjust.works
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    5 days ago

    For passwords you have to keep in your head, diceware. Surprised it’s not already mentioned! Basically you roll dice to choose words from a long wordlist until you have 6 or 7 words.

    Human brains are good at remembering words. It’s way easier to remember a password that looks like:

    grandson estimator virtuous scabbed poet parasitic
    

    than it is to remember a random character string.

  • randombullet@programming.dev
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    5 days ago

    I use passphrases from movies of shows that I like. Then add a special symbol and a number that I like.

    Thanks for nothing you useless reptile!61

    This has 100.54 bits of entropy. I consider anything above 60 sufficient enough

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Similar, but I just take the first letter of each word, keep proper pronunciation, and turn some into numbers as appropriate.

      Two trailer park girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside.

      Becomes

      2tpggrto,rto,rto.

      No, for the record I do not use THAT song.

        • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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          5 days ago

          Depends. I like this because it’s shorter, but still maintains a good level of security, and I’ll never forget it. Technically the full password is stronger, yeah. This also has the added benefit of someone being able to see you type it or catch a glimpse of it plaintext for some reason and have NO chance of remembering it.

          Either way, they’re both pretty secure, I just don’t wanna type several lines of… Anything each time I log in.

    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I worked in IT at a company years ago that standardized on song lyrics in a similar fashion:

      4 Those about 2 rock we salute you!

      I want 2 rock & roll all night

      Etc.

  • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    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).