Saturday, August 25, 2012

Fun On Friday #149: Passwords

I've been thinking about passwords. In particular, how can I help eleven year-olds to choose secure passwords that they won't have forgotten a week later?

Thanks to a suggestion from Mr Jones, I was tempted to go for the xkcd approach:

Password Strength - xkcd

...but I think may be too abstract for younger children.

Mr McSwan suggested Dinopass. Child friendly and "good enough" security for now... as long as I remember to revisit password security every year as they get older and discuss how they can make them even better.

Do you have a fun password utility/site you can recommend?



2 comments:

Mr T said...

Hi David,

I used to worry about this too, but then realised that password entropy is not something your average 11 year-old needs to be concerned with; I can't really see a reason someone would run a brute-force algorithm hack on their network login.

I think it's much more important to focus on the practical steps they can take to keep their password 'useful' in the real world ie:
- Unguessable by their peers (i.e. not their favourite football team, DOB, pet name...)
- Different passwords for different services to limit damage
- know the importance of never sharing it, no matter how much you trust someone just now.
- awareness of phishing scams

Just my $0.02 !

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