Re: [gentoo-user] Coming up with a password that is very strong.

[Laurence Perkins <lperkins@openeye.net>]

On Sun, 2019-02-03 at 23:47 -0600, Dale wrote:
> 
> 
> How do you, especially those who admin systems that are always being
> hacked at, generate strong passwords that meet the above?  I've
> googled
> and found some ideas but if I use the same method, well, how many
> others
> are using that same method, if you know what I mean.  ;-)  Just
> looking
> for ideas. 
> 
> Thanks much.
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 
> 
> P. S.  I haven't had time to deal with the video thing in previous
> thread.  It's on my todo list still.  :-( 
> 

Take 80 to 100 characters of something you already have memorized. 
Poetry, bible verses, RFCs, pages of the phone book, digits of pi out
of the middle, whatever.  Run it through a transposition, substitution,
or combination cipher that you can calculate in your head on-the-fly. 
(Do avoid the substitutions that everyone uses since those will be
tried first.)

Now you only need to remember a pointer to the memorized section, the
length, and the cipher specification.  There are enough possible
combinations that an attacker won't be able to make a meaningful
reduction in entropy by examining your social media.

As an example:  The second paragraph of Hamlet's soliloquy and invert
the case based on whether the corresponding digit of e is odd or even.

LMP