Daniel from http://www.dailyblogtips.com published an article with some of his ideas on how to create passwords for multiple sites.

The idea is to create an algorithm and use that for every site. It is a good concept, but there is a small danger if someone steals the password from one site and figure out the algorithm used. You then lost all your passwords.

My idea and what I always use is a bit different. I don’t like password managers, but I like crypto, so I take advantage of one-way hashes (md5, sha1, etc) and generate passwords using them.

How it works?

First, I choose a good long password that I will use everywhere. For example qwerty (don’t use that, just an example). Now for every site, your password will be the md5 (or sha1) of qwerty + site name. For example:

$ echo “qwerty http://www.facebook.com” | md5
9d7d9b30592fd43dd6629ef5c12c6e9a

$ echo “qwerty http://www.twitter.com” | md5
cdf0e74e19836efb20f29120884b988d

That way my password for facebook is 9d7d9b30592fd43dd6629ef5c12c6e9a and for twitter is: cdf0e74e19836efb20f29120884b988d

Both long and secure. If someone steals my twitter password he has no way to reverse back to figure out the other passwords. Plus, doing that you don’t need any password software stored (just the md5/sha1 binaries which come by default on Linux and are easy to find on Windows).

Simple and easy..

A few days ago Tonu Samuel published the distribution of passwords between men and women for a site with more than 800,000 users.

Who do you think is better at passwords? Let the gender war begin…

At total, they got around 700,000 males and 130,000 female users, but let’s look at the percentages.

• Percentage of users using their first or last name as their password (or a combination of the two):

  Male: 5.5%
  Female: 6.2%

• Passwords by size

Male:
6 chars: 31%
8 chars: 19%
7 chars: 16%
9 chars: 7%
5 chars: 7%
4 chars: 6%

Female:
6 chars: 31%
8 chars: 18%
7 chars: 17%
5 chars: 8%
9 chars: 7%
4 chars: 7%

As you can see, the percentages are very close. My conclusion is that men and women are equally bad at creating passwords If you look at the document, the most used passwords are still “123456″, “password”, “qwerty”, etc… These basic combinations are used by more than 5% of all accounts.