Passphrase

Using password is one of the easiest ways to protect your account. But everyone isn’t really aware how to make a strong password (the length and the combination of characters, symbols, and numeric) and how to protect their password. Some people use the same password for every account, tell the other their password, write down their password on the sticky note, put it on their pc, or never change their password regularly. Imagine that your mailbox is as important as your “server”, imagine that someone will randomly changed your configuration thus make your setting works improperly, damage your image-or so called “pencitraan” in Indonesian language, steal your data, or even use your data for deception purposes. Am I too paranoid? No, I’m just trying to remind you that password is just the lowest security you could do to protect your “life”.

Suddenly remember about one thing called passphrase. A passphrase is a sequence of words or other text used to control access to a computer system, program or data. A passphrase is similar to a password in usage, but is generally longer for added security. Passphrases are often used to control both access to, and operation of, cryptographic programs and systems. Passphrases are particularly applicable to systems that use the passphrase as an encryption key. The origin of the term is by analogy with password. The modern concept of passphrases is believed to have been invented by Sigmund N. Porter in 1982 (Wikipedia). In a computer networking, the easy definition of a passphrase is, one or a few small words chosen by an administrator or user for use as a security setting. Passphrases are designed to make network security settings easier to remember (compnetworking.about.com).

Other stuff I copied from wikipedia, here are the typical advice about choosing a passphrase:
– Long enough to be hard to guess
– Not a famous quotation from literature, holy books, et cetera
– Hard to guess by intuition—even by someone who knows the user well
– Easy to remember and type accurately
– For better security, any easily memorable encoding at your own level can be applied
– Not reused between sites, applications and other different sources.

Instead of using a strong password which needs habit to write it fast, we could use a passphrase. Freely decide what to choose to be your passphrase, something easy to remember which need, at least one hint to enter your accounts. At last, we just need to manage our password by change it regularly.

Finally, let’s find out about passphrase from accurate references.
Cheers.

 

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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