How much easier would your life be if you did not have to use any passwords? Just imagine… No more teeth-sucking moments when asked for yet another unique new password or time wasted searching for lost passwords that you used to know. While you cannot do away with them yet, if you find that you are juggling altogether too many passwords for comfort then the right solution is here.
Before diving into what you can do, why should you have different passwords? Most months there is news of more online security breaches at well-known companies such as Sony, Ebay or Amazon. This means that your email and password for that site may have been stolen. Do you use the same email and password for other sites? If so you may have an uncomfortable feeling while wondering when someone will use them.
While having different passwords is good, they should also be long because these are more challenging to guess than short passwords.
There are three solutions for you to choose from. My favourite is the last one, which is also the easiest.
The first is the reliable diary filled with pages of passwords. The benefits are simplicity, it will not disappear during a computer failure and the diary is usually not too difficult to find. Sadly it is also rather insecure in the case of fire or theft.
The second is a password manager. These are built into the major browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. When you enter a password for a site, the browser will offer to remember it and will serve it up when you next visit the site…simplicity itself. While the technical security of this is adequate, your store of passwords is available to anyone with access to your computer. Worse still, your passwords might vanish during a severe computer failure. And did I mention that your passwords are only available to you while at your own computer?
To deal with the computer failure issue, some password managers store your passwords online so that they are always available to you. A popular example of this is Lastpass which is free software that ties into your browser and is unlocked by a single password that you remember. Your passwords for websites are then offered automatically and Lastpass will even produce new strong passwords for fresh websites. Simple to setup and widely used, this still means that you are storing your passwords with a stranger.
I leave the most radical solution to last. What makes it unusual is that it requires nothing. No diary, no software, no third-party services. It also entails a pleasant sense of independence: use your memory. Before you reject this out of hand, I would like to show you how to make this the easiest solution. In addition, the benefits are that you have your passwords with you at all times, they are unique, strong and cannot be lost.
This is how it works. You make your passwords just like a sandwich. Each password has the same two slices of bread on the outside but a different filling. Making the filling for each site is easy as it is a few characters to remind you about the website.
Here is an example. My slices of bread are Brown and 123FluffyWhite. For Amazon my filling could be amazon. Then my password is Brownamazon123FluffyWhite. My Ebay password could be Brownebay123FluffyWhite. You can make the slices and filling more complex and you will find that they are still easy to remember. If you forget a password, recalling possible fillings is simple for you to guess.
Don’t make a meal of your passwords, make a sandwich!