a thought about UNIX login security

[swatt at ittvax.UUCP]

One method I've used to pick passwords is to take the first letter from
each word in some random phrase in a magazine advertisement.  This has
the advantage that it almost never looks like an english word, and
hence cannot be produced by pseudo-english generators.  It has the
disadvantage that advertisements tend to generate short (5-6 word)
slogans, so the resulting password is subject to exhaustive search.  To
cure this, take the first letter from each word in a line of your
favorite poem:

	"I must go down to the sea again":		imgdttsa
	"Fog creeps in on little cat feet":		fciolcf
	"There was a young man from Nantucket":		twaymfn

and so on.

Another method is take trade names backwards: "Coca-Cola" becomes
"alocacoc".

A friend of mine once wrote a filter which read standard input,
and only passed to standard output words with successive letters
on opposite sides of the standard keyboard (so you could type
it faster).  He called it "baf" for "Back And Forth".

	- Alan S. Watt