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Making a Strong Memorable Password

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Even with a password manager, you need one master password you can remember. Learn a simple sentence-based method to build a 30+ character password that no hacker can crack.

Woman chatting with robot
Even with a password manager, you'll need at least one password: the password to your password manager. You must be able to remember it. Two factors make a good password:1. It must be unguessable. This includes something that appears nowhere else. So it cannot be in any dictionary. It cannot appear in Wikipedia or anywhere else a hacker might download to test against. It can never have been previously used in any of the billions of passwords that were lost in breaches.2. It must be long. Currently, that means more than 15 characters, but it is always growing and we would rather not have to change it in a few years. I recommend at least 25 characters.

This is the latest system I am recommending. It is better than the one I use.

Two moderately connected sentences or one long one that means something to you. Something you'll remember. Choose 2 characters, like ,,,999 Repetition is Okay. These are for filler to lengthen your password. Use capitals at the beginning of your sentences and elsewhere if appropriate. Then type the first 2 letters of each word with the characters in between the sentences. If there is only one letter in the word, that's okay.

So, 12 words gives you 24 characters, then 6 more with the symbols. Then punctuation would make over 30 characters. For example:

Currently, my favorite television show is Sue Thomas FBEye. It is sweet.

I used television instead of TV because TV is too much of a clue, but te isn't. I'll treat FBEye as a single word, so just FB.

So, with the same fillers, that becomes:
Cu,myfateshisSuThFB....999Itissw.

So 32 characters. This has 102 bits of entropy and anything over 80 is unbreakable even by a nation state.

Notice on my example after the FB I have four periods. That is because the first sentence ends with FBEye., and then I add 3 periods of my filler. There is also a period at the end.




Date: July 2026


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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

 
 
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