Better Passwords Made Easy

By now, everyone knows what a bad password is: your name, your child's name, your pet's name, your birthday. But what does a good password--which must be both hard to break and easily remembered--look like? A group of scientists from Cambridge University Computer Laboratory say it might be this: MsPi24yo. While that's a hard-to-break combination of numbers and upper- and lower-case letters, it is actually quite simple to recall because it is a mnemonic phrase that stands for "My sister Pam is 24 years old." That use of mnemonic phraseology is the key to good codes, according to The Memorability and Security of Passwords--Some Empirical Results.