How to Teach Humans to Remember Really Complex Passwords

Wired published a piece on some useful tricks to help us humans commit secure passwords to memory:

But a study from two researchers at Microsoft and Princeton suggests there’s hope for those much-maligned secret strings of charters. Randomly generate a long, nearly uncrackable password, and it can be surprisingly easy to burn it into your neurons.

At the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security today, Stuart Schechter and Joseph Bonneau plan to reveal an experiment they designed to teach people to remember very strong, random passwords. With their process, which took a total of 12 minutes of users’ time on average, about nine out of 10 test subjects were able to remember a 56-bit password or passphrase–one for which a hacker would have to try quadrillions of guesses to successfully crack the secret.

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