Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess

THE // INTERCEPT ^ | 03/26/2015 9:29 AM | Micah Lee

[Utilizer]

Interesting way to generate a human-friendly and hard to guess passphrase.

[wally_bert]

Bookmark for later.

[RightFighter]

ThisIsAVerySecurePasswordPhrase

T#isI$Not

[Scrambler Bob]

M4L Password

[glorgau]

Yoda speak you should use when pass phrase generating you are. :-)

[MeganC]

The NSA doesn’t hack your passwords. The NSA calculates the hash key that’s generated by your password.

So “I Like Ice Cream” is not stored on your computer but the hash key of 7b783177134c3bfe95647ca3e12ddeb4 is stored on your computer and it can be calculated.

[PetroniusMaximus]

There are other ways of cracking passwords.

Like having one’s eyeballs pulled out or having a blowtorch applied to one’s genitals.

[MeganC]

Yoda speak you should use when pass phrase generating you are. :-)

=

97ab903e176f04b358ea884003107fc4

[MeganC]

“...or having a blowtorch applied to one’s genitals.”

Oh, you’ve had a yeast infection, too?

:-P

[Fester Chugabrew]

Ditto pop fizzle nuk crypto mulch gig

[Nevadan]

re: How to memorize your crazy passphrase

This is where I get in trouble. Every now and then my mind goes blank, and I can’t remember my 4 digit pin number on my ATM card. So just keeping my passphrase in my head would be a problem.

[Riflema]

I'd like to ask a (dumb) question: how do they know when they've cracked a password? If they know because the content is suddenly legible, what if you encrypt the content with one method, then encrypt the result using some other method.

Or an I missing something?

[Maurice Tift]

  Imagine your adversary has taken the lyrics from every song ever written, taken the scripts from every movie and TV show, taken the text from every book ever digitized and every page on Wikipedia, in every language, and used that as a basis for their guess list. Will your passphrase still survive?

  RamaLamaBoom5NakkaBamPowSmooNakka7

[Utilizer]

Encryption doesn’t work that way. Imagine having a bowlful of small 3D shapes such as spheres, cubes, and triangular pyramids. Place a firm sheet over it with cutouts of one shape, say squares. The result will be nothing but cube outputs. Then place all the resulting objects in another bowl and there is only one shape of filter to allow them to pass through again.

Not a perfect example, but it should point out why you have to use the same filter to encrypt and decrypt your files.

[thorvaldr]

I’ll stick with “Password123” thank you very much

[bgill]

If BB wants to snoop, it will.

[thackney]

For years my passwords gave been acronyms made from phrases with numbers and symbols.

[Rebelbase]

I hate it when that happens.

[goodnesswins]

bfl....computer security/passwords

[atomic_dog]

I’ll stick with “Password123” thank you very much

For me, "letmein!" will suffice.