Louis LeBlanc writes: > > A practice one of my former co-workers liked was to pick a song and pull > letters out; take Fleetwood Mac: "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow". > You could get "DSTAT", turn that into something else, like "dSt4T". > Pretty short, but definitely not a dictionary word. You could even take > more letters from the next line" "Don't Stop, It'll Soon Be Here" and get > "dSt4TDs1SbH", or any number of derivations. If you forget the actual > password, your song is an excellent hint. >
I think that comes from RFC1244, (Site Security Handbook,) which is a pretty good security SOP for *_general_* 'Net users. The stuff 1244 suggests is not perfect, by any means, but is a relatively good compromise between security, usability, and operational costs. For example, to keep sysadmin phone calls on forgotten passwds to a minimum, 1244 suggests the words in a user's favorite song, ('cause folk's minds remember the words,) to seven letters-maybe with capitalization. For example, if the "Star Spangled Banner" is the 'fav, then a passwd would be "oH#saY#caN#". If logins must be updated periodically, then the user's next passwd would be, "yoU#See", and so on. Its certainly not perfect[1], but its cheap to administer, easy to use, etc., and realatively hard to crack by algorithmic means-at least without filling up the log files, giving the sysadm a "heads up" to type something beginning with "block ..." 1244 has a lot of cute little security things like that. John [1] Yea, I've tried a passwd policy of denied vowel-consonant relationships, (e.g., words.) Not only did I have a lot of phone calls on forgotten passwds, I gained credentials as an English teacher. -- John Conover, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.johncon.com/ _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"