For obvious reasons I’ve been creating some new passwords lately, and I wanted to share my method for creating strong passwords that are easy to remember yet hard to guess.

Of course, Randall Munroe set the bar with this comic:

It does make a lot of sense, but the method has its critics. Attackers can and do use random word generators which can break such passwords more quickly, even with, say, substituting “3” for “e”, etc.

There is also a good argument to be made that we should all be using password managers that generate long random passwords and not really creating passwords at all.

Then there is the very good idea of using two factor authentication, but that tends to augment passwords more than replace them.

In normal life you have to have at least a few passwords memorized, such as the one to get into your device and one to get into your password manager, so I thought I’d share my technique.

I like music, and I tend to listen to pretty obscure artists. What I do is to think of a random lyric from a song I like and then convert that into a password.

For example, right now I’m listening to the album Wet Tennis by Sofi Tukker. The track that gives me the biggest earworm is “Original Sin” which opens with the lyric:

So I think you’ve got
Something wrong with you
Something’s not right with me, too
It’s not right with me

If I were going to turn that into a password, I would come up with something like:

sItUgswwysnrwm,2inrwm

Looks pretty random, and contains lower case and upper case letters, a number and a special character. At 21 characters it isn’t quite as long as “correcthorsebatterystaple” but you can always add more words from the lyrics if needed.

Just thought I’d throw this out there as it works for me. The only thing I have to remember is not to hum the song while logging in.