this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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For petty services where you don't want to have to break out the password manager, try making your own mental salted hash.
Pick four long words at random. Assign each of these to the four quadrants of the alphabet.
A-F - Equipment
G-M - Triumphant
N-S - Sampling
U-Z - Fatigued
Pick one number:
4
Now, take the first letter of the service that the password is for, and that selects your quadrant word. Take the number of letters in the service and multiply it against your number. Take the last letter of the service, and on your querty keyboard, move all the way to the right of thst line to select the first symbol there. Thats your unique password thats salted with yo ur personal words and number.
Facebook = Equipment32:
Lemmy = Triumphant20{
Pizza Hut = Sampling36{
If you want more security for these petty services, use longer words, bigger number, or use some other metric, Tweak the algorithm to make it unique to you. Maybe capitalize a middle letter in your salt word based on the length of the service name. Maybe add the first letter of the colour of the service logo to the password, EG
Facebook = Equipment32:B
Lemmy = Triumphant20{T
Pizza Hut = Sampling36{R
Petty services I would consider to be anything that's not super critical, and is at a higher likelyhood of breaching my shit.
For banks, primary emails, or government services, use a more complex algorithm or a random string of chars from your password manager.
Just come up with one strong password (see https://xkcd.com/936/) for your password manager and use randomly generated passwords for everything else. There's no reason to manually compute a hash every time you sign up for a service.
Also, for a non-remembering solution, use a security key with your password manager, the kind that plugs into USB and you have to tap a button to authenticate. Then you can generate a true random password and store it somewhere safe as a backup, and mainly use the key for day to day.
what about when you're on your phone?
Many security keys have NFC, or if you're on a modern phone, you can use USB type C (Yubikey 5C)
Authentication app is another option. I believe some password managers can be set up to take the master password once per device and then accept authenticator codes to unlock for each subsequent time.
Or, since your phone is probably a lot more locked down than your computer, almost every modern phone since like the days of the iPhone 5S has a cryptographic TPM/secure enclave in the processor while the fact that not every computer has one was a major sore spot in Windows 11 compatibility, it might also be acceptable to just leave the password manager unlocked on your phone all the time, depending on your threat model. Assuming your phone is both encrypted and password protected and you trust the OS to implement both securely, the pin on your phone works more like the pin on your credit card than a traditional password login on a non-encrypted non-TPM computer, so even if a bad actor physically had your phone, it would be very hard to actually extract data out of it without the passcode (assuming it's just your garden variety cybercriminal and not the CIA or something), which would serve as your master password in that case. Hardware security features can also resist brute force attacks where someone clones your hard drive and hooks it up to their own computer to try and guess the encryption password without the wrong entry time delays slowing them down, a secure enclave will actually enforce the time delays with no easy bypass and can also be set to wipe the phone if you get the passcode wrong too many times.
Phone apps are also almost entirely sandboxed from each other and can't directly access other apps' data, so the risk of a malicious program reading the password manager's cache or database is also far lower than most desktop operating systems.