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.comEnglish
      7·
      23 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.comEnglish
    17·
    23 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
    121·
    23 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.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    23 days ago

    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.

  • Like the wind...@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    61·
    23 days ago

    They’re all the same-ish.

    Let’s say my password is Token, but spelled like t0k3||

    I would attach something related to the site on it, so if the site is lemmy for example, the password would be like

    t0k3||Addictedtosurfing

    If the site is Amazon something like

    t0k3||Thanksformyfavoritejob

    I called it “lock and key” style and I’d change the beginning part, the “lock”, once a year.

    So next year it’ll be ef|=027Addictedtosurfing

    These are examples lol

    • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      23 days ago

      Pretty much this. But I used a function of the host name, so it would be easier to remember.

      It gets annoying when the site forces you to rotate the password. After that happened a couple of times I started using a password manager.

  • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    23 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.