Thursday, July 17, 2008

Password Management : Too Many passwords ... how do u manage them ??

With technology touching our lives more than ever before , this is becoming a common issues faced by MANY ...
A partial solution came up ... OpenID With some drawbacks
  • Not applicable to secure sites like banking etc
  • Adopted by most NOT ALL.
So how to solve it ??

Well the answer is simple ALGORITHM .. he he .. wondering how ??
let me give you an example...

Generate an algorthim , exploiting the fact that the website names are unique.
If you are member of two websites www.websiteone.com and websitetwo.com
your password may be ... webONEsite and webTWOsite
And if you decide to join another www.websitethree.com then following your example you may keep your password as webTHRsiteEE

The algorithm used above is ... take the 1st three letters of website , append with the last three letters of website and then followed by the remaining letters.

Intelligent lot may think of Exceptional cases like
  • What if the website name is less than 6 letters ( eg yahoo.com , gmail.com )
  • What if it is exactly 6 letter
  • etc , etc ....
Well i would say that its YOUR responsibility to make a proper algorithm that works for most of the sites that you log on to. And i just gave an example here to make your life easier I am not researching on this technique to make EFFICIENT ALGOs.

There are certain Implicit Requirement of this technique. The generated password must follow certain guidelines.

for example your Algorithm may be take the first three letters of website and then append with last three letter's ascii value.
So
www.websiteone.com => web797869
www.websitetwo.com => web848779

Well thats better.. you are a quick learner. :)

But the downside of this algorithm is that it will give same password for sites like webXXXone.com and webYYYone.com or infact webYYYYone.com well thats not a downside how can someone know that you have same password for two of your website ??

Hope this helps
~cheerz !!

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