How Bad Spelling and Grammar Could Be the Key To Choosing a Good Password

by Mark Prigg
Daily Mail

Birthdays, pet names and your place of birth are already huge no-nos when choosing a secure password.

But researchers said today that the key to finding more secure passwords could be straightforward - just don't use good grammar or spelling.

Ashwini Rao and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University researched the current generation of password cracking systems.

They found that many people, on being asked to choose longer passwords, made them just as easy to guess.

'Use of long sentence-like or phrase-like passwords such as 'abiggerbetterpassword' and 'thecommunistfairy' is increasing,' the researchers say in their paper, due to be presented at the Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy in San Antonio, Texas, next month.

The researchers say that other types of familiar structures like postal addresses, email addresses and URLs may also make for less secure passwords, even if they are long.

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January 18, 2013

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