Technical information

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By Trevor Drover
Passwords are a necessary
evil these days. Passwords help
keep my iMac and portable de-
vices safe, my data confidential,
and my money away from the
bad guys. But it frustrates me
that every time I am required to
come up with yet another pass-
word for a Web site, a user ac-
count, or any of a multitude of
other purposes, I feel, as you
probably do, that it’s too much
mental effort to produce and re-
member all these passwords.
But I don’t want to expose
myself to exploitation by choos-
ing a simple password and using
it everywhere. I could be put-
ting my identity or data or even
worse, my money, at risk. I won’t
sacrifice security for convenience.
I do use the app “1Pass-
word” to store my passwords,
but it does slow me down as I regularly have to enter my master
password so that I can access my log-in names and passwords. In
addition, coming up with a unique, easy-to-enter password is not
always easy. Read on and you will see a possible solution.
Listening to my favourite Mac Podcast recently this subject
was featured with some novel twists. To quote the author of the
cartoon courtesy of xkcd.com/936 below: “Through 20 years of
effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are
hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.”
My article will focus on creating passwords we are required to
enter to gain access to a
website, computer or port-
able device. This is where
the bad guys have to guess
how many characters are
in your password and what
they are. It does not cover
making passwords difficult
to decrypt if they have been
stolen from a website - Ste-
ve Neilsen has done a great
presentation on this subject
at our monthly meetings.
Also see “A Real World
Theft” below.
Steve Gibson is a pro-
grammer and security con-
sultant who constantly sticks
it to Apple and Microsoft,
highlighting security flaws in
their software. He says on
his website: “Every password
you use can be thought of
as a needle hiding in a hay-
stack. After all searches of
common passwords and dictionaries have failed, an attacker must
resort to a “brute force” search – ultimately trying every possible
combination of letters, numbers and then symbols until the com-
bination you chose, is discovered.” The object is not to have a
difficult needle in a small haystack, it is to have an easy (for you)
needle in a huge haystack. More characters equals larger haystack;
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