Disclaimer: I use a password manager, so please don’t direct your comments at me.

So I know this person that says they don’t use a password manager because they have a better system like… I’m gonna give an example:

Lets say, a person loves Star Wars, and their favorite character is Yoda. The favorite Their favorite phrase is from The Good Place “This is the Bad Place!”. And their favorite date is 1969 July 20th (first landing on moon).

So here:

Star Wars Yoda = SWYd

“This is the Bad Place!” = ThIThBaPl!

1969 July 20 —> 69 07 20

So they have this “core” password = SWydThIThBaPl!690720

Then for each website, they add the website’s first and last 2 characters of the name to the front of the password…

So, “Lemmy Forum” = leum

Add this to the beginning of the “core” password it becomes:

leumSWydThIThBaPl!690720

For Protomail Email it’s: prilSWydThIThBaPl!690720

For Amazon Shopping it’s: amngSWydThIThBaPl!690720

Get the idea?

The person says that, since the beginning of the password is unique, its “unhackable”, and that the attacker would need like 3 samples of the password to figure out their system.

Is this person’s “password system” actually secure?

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    It’s probably not safe if they use that for everything. Someone could match emails and password suffixes, then they’d only have four letters to brute force. So all it takes is two leaks that your friend is on and they’re at real risk.

    Generally, this would be avoided by whatever site storing their passwords as hashes instead of in plain text, but you can’t rely on that.

    They should just use a password manager.