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.
The problem with using hash schemes like this is that when your password is leaked you can't easily rotate the password.
Not to mention if you suddenly developed amnesia or dementia
This is what got me using a password manager. I didn't want to trust a password manager because it felt like they would be highly targeted and one vulnerability would reveal everything. And let's be honest they still are the same.
So I had my own scheme for generating passwords. I made myself a script that I could use on my phone and PC. It worked beautifully and effortlessly until occasionally a service would force me to choose a new password. When this started happening I made a new scheme for generating passwords and made a new script. When it first happened it was still reasonably easy because there was only one service I had to use the alternative. It started to become more difficult the more services asked for a new password.
I used my own system for several years until I had enough with trying to remember which services used the alternative scheme and wondered when I'd have to make a third scheme. And if I did then the mental complexity would significantly increase.
Interestingly only a couple of services publicly announced they had been hacked and none of my passwords have ever appeared on haveibeenpwned. So I wonder why these services asked for a new password and if they had been attacked why they chose not to announce it.