Muscle Up Your Passwords

Jan Novak, Associate Director jan.novak@law.csuohio.edu | January 31, 2008 - 12:16

We are a password dependent people: just review our Law Student Usernames, Passwords, Ids, and Pins for a walk through several of the passwords students need to establish just to negotiate fundamental resources here at Cleveland Marshall. Don’t take passwords too lightly – in fact, a password should be a weighty matter, as in “strong,” which describes passwords made of a combination of seven letters, numbers and symbols with a little upper and lower case mixture thrown in. Dennis Kennedy’s Power Passwords in 93 ABA Journal (December 2007) at p. 59 sets out some guidelines to creating passwords that will thwart crackers and yet still make enough internal sense to be memorable. He advises a) getting rid of passwords in the form of words or names, b) using a root password made of a combination of letters and symbols with the addition of resource identifying suffixes and c)combining a base password and portions of a pass phrase.