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A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

qwertycards.com

1–10 of 110 posts

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#5
This would actually be very useful for my Google and LastPass password. I have everything else in my LastPass manager, but it is always trying to get into my google account from different places is difficult, so I have a rememberable password for both.

This would let me keep a much more secure password for both.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#7
This is a substitution cipher and it's not very secure. Consider what we can do if we compromise the Amazon password that's given as an example on the website:

   sh(/J3HqAfQsu..u.rqf
Since the password came from Amazon, we know that the last 6 characters are "Amazon," which tells us that:

  . = A
  u = M
  r = Z
  q = O
  f = N
Now we can start attacking the codeword, which are the characters between the 8-character "space bar code" and the website name:

  AfQsu.
Using the letters we already know, we can determine that the codeword is:

  _N__MA
It's probably a dictionary word, and we know that the blank spaces don't correspond to any of the letters we already know. According to the following command:

  grep '^[^amzon]n[^amzon][^amzon]ma$' 
...the only possible codeword is "engima," so now we know that:

  A = E
  Q = G
  s = I
Combine with another compromised password, and we're coming dangerously close to being able to generate a password for any arbitrary website.

Edit: I agree with the replies that this is an unlikely attack considering how passwords are typically compromised. And it's probably better than how most people choose passwords. But the website claims that this generates "very strong passwords," which is nonsense.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#8
This is a lot like PasswordCard[0] except not free.

[0] https://www.passwordcard.org/en

I think I'd like PasswordCard because it's pretty freeform - just pick a starting point and a visual direction/pattern and copy letters from the card. But honestly I don't much like the idea of relying on a physical token if I don't need to. Almost losing my 2FA last year was a bit scary.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#9
I actually really like this idea. I guess if your attacker did get your password in the clear (bad encryption or whatever) then they'd basically have access everything right? I mean, the number of letters at the start is presumably fairly constant, they'd know the site it was for so they could then work out the "unique secret" in the middle right?

That said, there's a certain amount of security through obscurity I guess.

Still, for any of the sites I really care about I use two factor authentication. I'd take a mediocre password and 2FA over a strong password (But happy to be proved wrong ;)

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#10
post #7

This is a substitution cipher and it's not very secure. Consider what we can do if we compromise the Amazon password that's given as an example on the website: sh(/J3HqAfQsu..u.rqf Since the password came from Amazon, we know that the last 6 characters are "Amazon," which tells us that: . = A u = M r = Z q = O f = N Now we can start attacking the codeword, which are the characters between the 8-character "space bar c…

There is no need to even break the codeword as it is the same for every site. In the above example say we want to guess their gmail password, it is probably:

   sh(/J3HqAfQsu.?u.??
We have only three characters to guess!

OTOH this is only relevant for targeted attacks where the attacker has one password. This still protects you pretty well from bulk attacks (so long as the card is not widely used) and is miles better than re-used or poor passwords at little usability cost.

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