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sf.me > Blog > Password Systems
Posted on: 2 May 2023
Reading time: 4 min
If you find it difficult to maintain strong passwords, then this guide is the only article you need to refer to. In this article, I will talk about an amazing trick to remember and manage all of your passwords.
It goes without saying that passwords are incredibly important. It is undeniably important to make sure your passwords are:
However, it seems futile to try using different passwords on every website. It is incredibly hard to remember just one; how can I remember more than 10?
The solution to this undeniably rampant issue is to use a password system. A password system is a set of rules and guidelines that you make and follow to create your passwords. Using a password system, you need not remember your passwords. All you have to do is string together available pieces of data, and you can remember your password immediately.
The most common response I hear from people when I ask them to create a password system is:
"I think using the same password on all accounts is better because I don't have a good memory to use a password system."
That response always baffles me. The whole point of a password system is not to remember your passwords but to remember a ruleset that will be cemented into your brain after 3 or 4 times of entering your passwords.
As aforementioned, a password system is a set of rules that you need to remember instead of all of your passwords separately. An effective password system consists of the following elements:
The main format and order of a password system is completely managed by you. First, let us go over creating a master password.
I recommend this method of creating master passwords to anyone since the passwords that are created are easy to remember but practically impossible to guess.
Make sure it is long but easily memorable. The one which pops in your mind when someone asks you to think of a sentence is a perfect choice as long as it is of considerable length.
Example: I love eating 43 and a half coconuts a day, I am not going to lie!
Take the first letter of each word in the sentence and write it as is. Do not change any characters to uppercase or lowercase or use a symbol to represent it.
Example: Ile43aahcad,Iangtl!
Take the password you have in the last step and make it stronger in a way that you will remember. This step is the one you have to be the most careful in because making it too strong will make it difficult to recollect in the future.
Do not use common substitutions like:
Example: I<3e43&1/2cad,IangtLIE!
Do not proceed to the next section without doing this step. Recall the sentence in your mind and try to write the same password you got in the previous step. Do this at least 10 times. Wait a few hours, then do it again. Wait until you sleep and do it again. This may seem unnecesarry, but most people underestimate the power of muscle memory. If you login to an account regularly, then you type your password without even thinking about it. The same trick can be applied here.
After a while, you will be able to type your extremely long password without any effort. You just think about it and your mind glides through the keyboard. This is super useful.
To make your password different for every website and service you go to, there needs to be a service differentiator. A service differentiator is a special combination of characters you add in your password system to make it unique to the service you are on. It is not very difficult to create a service differentiator and it is easier to remember.
The elements of a service differentiator are the name of the service and length of the name of the service. Below is an example of a name differentiator used for creating a Nextcloud account, Microsoft account and Google account respectively.
nextcLOUD!999
microSOFT!999
googlE!666
As you can see, I added the name of the service in with the first 5 letter capitalized with an exclamation mark and the length of the service three times.
By this point, you can make your own service differentiator easily.
It is finally time to integrate your master password into a password system. It is called a password system, which means that it is dynamic and changes for every website. A sample password system can be the following:
(SERVICE DIFFERENTIATOR) + (MASTER PASSWORD)
In my example's case, my Google account password would be:
googlE!666I<3e43&1/2cad,IangtLIE!
The password above is 33 characters, yes 33 characters long. No one will be able to guess it and it will take hundreds of centuries to crack. Best of all, it is different for each account.
You can mix the order up. Just make sure you don't keep changing the system and use one system. The best part is that if you need to change your passwords, you can just make another system that will work just as well. By that point, the previous system will be embedded into your brain. So, you can remember multiple strong passwords using this step.
Please note that this is not enough. If you have followed this guide, you have taken a massive step towards protecting your accounts. However, many cybercriminals rely on phishing attacks. Please do not click on random links and please do not enter your information on random websites.
Congratulations! You now know how to create an extremely strong password that is different on each account.