Passwords are indispensable in our daily lives, practically any service on the internet that we use requires one, so it is necessary to create passwords that guarantee the protection of our data. According to good security practices in data protection our passwords should have 4 characteristics:
- They must be easy for users to remember.
- They should not be easily guessed by other people.
- They should not be guessed or easily discovered by special programs.
- They must be complex, contain numbers, symbols and a good combination of upper and lower case letters.
Among the listed characteristics, probably the most important requirement that stops us from applying complex passwords is precisely that of remembering the password. In fact creating a very complex password like: *456PnB6790-56#ewl<fY guarantees a high level of security but it is so complex that it could be very difficult to remember. This leads us to the easiest solution, that is to create passwords that are easy to remember but turn into our Achilles heel when it comes to protecting our data. So how should we do to create a secure but at the same time easy to remember password?
One of the simplest solutions to respect the 4 characteristics for a secure password and in particular the first one, is to create a password that consists of a set of real words that can be easily associated with images so that it can be easier to remember. An example would be: radiotrapanolamp23. Although these words are real, they are very difficult for a password-breaking program to guess, since they cannot be found in any dictionary.
Personally the use of the previous solution I think is not the best in fact thanks to the progress of technology are invented new programs capable of associating words of common use and then are able to guess our passwords.
The most effective solution to remedy point 1 of our features for a secure password is the use of a password manager. This tool allows us to ignore the first requirement since it is able to store our passwords inside a safe in a secure way, so we only need to remember one password that will be used to access our safe. Among the most famous password managers I would recommend Bitwarden, a very complete and secure manager that can protect our passwords and create complex passwords for us (you can read my review here).
To conclude then create a secure password is very important if we want to protect our data effectively, if we do not want or are not able to create complex passwords we can rely on tools such as password managers.