Computersight -

This is a continuation of a series on internet passwords, by boisson. To view Part One, which talks about choosing strong passwords, please click here.

Lol. Looks like your new neighbours are fitting in well.

So, passwords, passwords. It’s only been 5 minutes since my last article, but hey, I thought it’d be good for information to be given in little bitesized chunks, so I’ve made my second article here.

History of Coding

Cryptography (or coding) has been used for thousands of years, even up to the time of Mozart. (The evidence of this was probably found tatooed onto some poor slave-dude’s skull, but we won’t talk about that.) However, up to WWII, and perhaps even the 1970’s serious coding was all done by the government until the publishing of a very tricksy paper written by a Mr. Hellman. (Gotta love that name.)

Right, now that we’ve got our ‘Who’, ‘What’ and ‘When’ done, let’s get straight down to the ‘How’.

boisson’s Instructions on creating your own encrypted Passwords’

1. Pick a word, any word. (’Monkey’ would do nicely.)
2. Spell out your word on a piece of paper, the letters one after the other along a nice straight horizontal line.    M   O   N   K   E   Y
3. Now write your alphabet letters, A-Z alongside your word in lowercase. MONKEYabcdefg…
4. Cross-Out any italic letters found in your italic alphabet.
5. Write out your new alphabet and encrypt your Strong, case-sensitive password.

M O N K E Y a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Note that the best way of remembering will be to use a word that doesn’t have repeated letters – Fool would result in FOL, which isn’t really easy to remember. On the other hand: HARBOUR would be a tough one to decode.

Why use this method? Oo

The advantage to this little method is that it’s really damn hard to decode. Most everyday codes require the shifting by the alphabet by perhaps a few spaces, and that’s all. What we’ve done here, is shifted it by a few, and then REPLACED some others with alternate letters. 

This is the end of the article. If you liked this one, you may like to view boisson’s other articles on internet security, found on his profile here.