Three random words.

A lot has been said about secure passwords and ways to create them. Some people recommend three random words, some password managers and others a random mixture of letters, numbers and “special characters”. I deal with all kinds of people on a daily basis, some who are computer literate and some who only just know how to turn a PC on and who definitely wouldn’t want to use a password manager. I know of one person who insists on writing all his passwords in a book he keeps on a shelf by his PC. That’s the real world, not an idealized one we’d all love to see. So what can we do for people like him? Let me demonstrate a way to use three random words that takes it a step further to make what appears to be a completely random mix of letters, numbers and special characters. It’s simple enough, yet also allows you to tweak it any way you want. those who insist on writing their passwords down can still use this method too, as the final result looks nothing like the three words written down. Let’s start with three random words. Actually, let’s start with “three random words”. Look at your computer keyboard. Notice how the letters are spaced in such a way that if you go up one line and to the left or the right, there’s a corresponding key. If I wanted to type my password going up and to the left, three would become 5y433, random would become 4qhe9j and words would become 294ew. Put those together and you have 5y4334qhe9j294ew. Let’s switch it up and go to the right this time. Now we get 6u5445wjr0k305re. Some passwords require a capital letter, so let’s change the first letter we see to a capital. 5Y4334qhe9j294ew. How about special characters? There are three words, with two spaces between them that we didn’t use. The first word has five letters, so let’s put a special character in place of where that first space would go and use the special character that corresponds with the number 5. That’s a % for those paying attention. Now our password looks like 5Y433%4qhe9j294ew. Random is next with 6, and that gives us 5Y433%4qhe9j^294ew. Finally, words has 5 letters, so we put a % at the end to give us the final password of 5Y433%4qhe9j^294ew%. And how do we remember it when we need to use it again? “Three random words”. The method can be tweaked if needed, so for example the first and third words are to the left, but the second one is to the right. It’s easy when you know how.