The Actual Meaning of a Strong Password

Sep 15
07:47

2011

Alan Tay

Alan Tay

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This article best describes what is a Strong Password. Internet users should follow the steps mentioned in order to create a super strong password for authentication purposes.

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It is important to have a strong password today with the increased of computer crime reported. Usually people will create a password that is simple and easy to remember rather than a complicated and more difficult to remember one. As a result,The Actual Meaning of a Strong Password Articles password are easier to crack today.
There are many criteria to consider when defining a strong password. Firstly is the type of characters used in a password. The type of characters here are referring to lower case, upper case, numeric, and special character. A password should combine at least three of the types mentioned and it is highly recommended to combine all of them.
Next is the length of the password where a strong password should not have less than ten characters. According to security researchers, normally user will create a password with the length of six to eight characters and not many will create a password which will exceed ten characters. If someone uses a brute-force attack to get your password, a longer password will increase the time for this technique to success.
Thirdly is a question where your password should represent certain meaning or just any random string. It is not recommended that your password represents certain words or person's name. These types of passwords are vulnerable to the 'dictionary attack'. However, it is possible to create a strong password which is not meaningful to others but only to yourself. This can be done in many ways and one of the famous one is to take a long phrase or sentence and use the beginning of each letter as the password.
After achieving all the conditions mentioned above, it might ended that the created password will be forgotten the following day. It could also be that the user uses some password generator and generate some random characters which also have the criteria of a strong password that is easily forgotten as well. When the password is so difficult to remember, it eventually has to store somewhere. Storing as a plain text inside your computer is not so safe now unless the user has a good encryption software to encrypt the password. Thus it is safer now to write it on a piece of paper and seal it somewhere physically safe. With the increasing number of malware infections, it is not so safe to simply store as a soft copy in your computer.
As a conclusion, creating a password is not something we can take lightly and the criteria mentioned above best defined a strong password.

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