The perfect password?: Researchers Perfect Password

Published: October 23, 2015

The perfect password?: Researchers Perfect Password, It turns out that neither ‘password’ nor ‘12345679’ make particularly secure passwords. When you are asked to create a new password, you have two concerns: the first is to make sure it’s secure and the second is to make sure you remember it.

These two things don’t go together very well. In fact, researchers have found that humans are pretty awful at being genuinely random, and random passwords are the ones that are very hard to decipher.

The University of Southern California’s Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight have published a paper with a simple and extremely effective technique for password creation: poems.

That doesn’t mean you have to conjure up your own version of The Iliad every time your computer prompts you to change your password, however.

To create a password, Ghavininejad and Knight first assigned every word in a 327,868-word dictionary a unique code. They then used a programme to generate a long random number, broke that number up into chunks, then translated those chunks into two short phrases.

Advanced computer programmes would take decades to crack one of the researchers’ passwords (Picture: Getty Images)
The programmed they used ensured that the two lines end in rhyming words. For example:

The nation Jakob deportees
attached a lightning referees

A password created by this method would take decades for an advanced computer programme to crack, and it’s easy to remember.

Ghazvininejad and Knight have developed an online generator for these poem-passwords, but the pair say the site is just for demonstration and could be insecure.

If you want your own perfect poem password, you can enter your email here and their programme will send you one before deleting it from the server. The pair concede that many sites have password character limits, but more and more are dropping that restriction due to the insecurity of short passwords.





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