Excerpts from IMPROVING THE SECURITY OF YOUR UNIX SYSTEM David A. Curry, Systems Programmer Information and Telecommunications Sciences and Technology Division ITSTD-721-FR-90-21 Selecting Passwords The object when choosing a password is to make it as dif- ficult as possible for a cracker to make educated guesses about what you've chosen. This leaves him no alternative but a brute-force search, trying every possible combination of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A search of this sort, even conducted on a machine that could try one million passwords per second (most machines can try less than one hundred per second), would require, on the average, over one hundred years to complete. With this as our goal, and by using the informa- tion in the preceding text, a set of guidelines for password selection can be constructed: o Don't use your login name in any form (as-is, reversed, capitalized, doubled, etc.). o Don't use your first or last name in any form. o Don't use your spouse's or child's name. o Don't use other information easily obtained about you. This includes license plate numbers, telephone numbers, social security numbers, the brand of your automobile, the name of the street you live on, etc. o Don't use a password of all digits, or all the same letter. This significantly decreases the search time for a cracker. o Don't use a word contained in (English or foreign language) dictionaries, spelling lists, or other lists of words. o Don't use a password shorter than six characters. o Do use a password with mixed-case alphabetics. o Do use a password with nonalphabetic characters, e.g., digits or punctuation. o Do use a password that is easy to remember, so you don't have to write it down. o Do use a password that you can type quickly, without having to look at the keyboard. This makes it harder for someone to steal your password by watching over your shoulder. Although this list may seem to restrict passwords to an extreme, there are several methods for choosing secure, easy- to-remember passwords that obey the above rules. Some of these include the following: o Choose a line or two from a song or poem, and use the first letter of each word. For example, ``In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree'' becomes ``IXdKKaspdd.'' o Alternate between one consonant and one or two vowels, up to eight characters. This provides non- sense words that are usually pronounceable, and thus easily remembered. Examples include ``routboo,'' ``quadpop,'' and so on. o Choose two short words and concatenate them together with a punctation character between them. For exam- ple: ``dog;rain,'' ``book+mug,'' ``kid?goat.'' The importance of obeying these password selection rules cannot be overemphasized. The Internet worm, as part of its strategy for breaking into new machines, attempted to crack user passwords. First, the worm tried simple choices such as the login name, user's first and last names, and so on. Next, the worm tried each word present in an internal dictionary of 432 words (presumably Morris considered these words to be ``good'' words to try). If all else failed, the worm tried going through the system dictionary, /usr/dict/words, trying each word [Spaf88]. The password selection rules above suc- cessfully guard against all three of these strategies.