HACKER Q&A
📣 WHA8m

Would you consider a password like this safe?


The question is in the title. What password I mean in the following. Think of the required security as for your crypto wallet or personal notes/ diary.

I imagine an algorythm that gives out a password. The algorythm consists of a few rules that involve only information that I can access in almost every other houshold.

  - calculator (basic arithmetic operations, cos, tan, sin, pi, e, ln, log)
  - bibel (most names/chapters will be written exactly same in different translations)
  - calendar (names and amount of days of months)
  - clock/ watch
  - periodic system
  - personal data (birthdate, name of family members)
  - alphabet
  - chess board
  - data I remember word by word (for example: dates/ events from history)
An algorythm could be something like:

  - The password has 16 figures. 
  - I multiply my birth year with pi. 
  - If a number is 1-5, I make a pair with its subsequent number.
  - The first number of a pair specifys the book of Moses.
  - Second number specifys the letter within the books name.
  - If the second number is uneven, the letter is capitalized.

  -> If I am born in 1990, password would be 6US69u06M688tEt0

  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
Safe from others provided they do not learn your deterministic formula, yes. Safe from yourself, maybe that too. If it is too complex you may have to keep something on your person that helps you solve your own passwords and then you have to protect that resource as well. I guess one would have to walk through the use-cases and steps required to see how feasible this is and then challenge some hacker friends to pen-test the process.
👤 pwg
It is not safe anymore, because you have just published the algorithm to the world.

If you want a safe password, then select the characters at random, and store the results in a secure location.

👤 uberman
Are you asking if this is a secure method to generate passwords or if this one result is readily crackable?

The method is obviously flawed as everyone born in 1990 shares this password. This one result though was relatively safe in that random password guessers estimate that it would take billions of years to crack.