Password Security Not Easy

Posted by michael on Friday December 10, 2004 @06:44AM from the duh dept.

mekkab writes "The Wall Street Journal reports (yet again) that despite knowing better, users do dumb things to compromise security. Is seven different 8 character passwords (with numbers and mixed cases) really too much to ask? Do people need training on how to make well known phrase (to them) into a perfect password acronym, or other memory boosting techniques? Or is it that the entire business culture needs to change from within to take digital security seriously?" If you require unmemorizable passwords, you've effectively changed the security requirement from "something you know" to "something you have", and if the required dongle is a note under your keyboard...

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Re:I only have 2 passwords by ifdef · 2004-12-10 06:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

I have about 4, EXCEPT FOR WORK. At work, they require changing passwords every month or so. So now, having used up all my imaginative ones, I use fairly easy-to-remember (and so easy-to-guess) passwords at work. Somehow, they don't seem to realize that by forcing me into the situation where I *can't* have a password that is both obscure and easy for me to remember, they are making the system LESS secure, rather than nore secure.