Your workplace probably has stringent rules in place about how to concoct system passwords: A minimum length, a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters,? at least one numeral, and those enigmatic “special characters” like $ and *.
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― Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
This approach tends to work reasonably well, with one major problem: It leads to users creating passwords so cumbersome that they can’t remember them and resort to writing them down on Post-It Notes, which get stuck to the very computer they are supposed to be protecting.
Now a Microsoft research team has come up with another strategy to ensure that users create good passwords, one that is so devilishly simple, it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been thought of before.
The central, simple idea: You can’t use a password if more than a handful of other people have already used it before.
This combats the main problem, which the aforementioned, complicated rules are intended to solve: Without restrictions, people tend to fall back to a smattering of trivially simple passwords, like “123456,NFL Jerseys,” “love,” and even “password.” While the Microsoft plan would probably ban thousands of passwords like these outright from the get-go, it would also ban other passwords once users started delving into more complicated constructions. The result: In a sufficiently large environment, only a limited number of users could have the same password, and the problem of “common passwords” would simply go away because there would be no such thing ― everyone’s password would be essentially unique.
Sadly, such a plan requires volume to actually work. According to the report, the system is only usable in environments with millions of users.
Microsoft hasn’t announced any plans to adopt this system (nor is it likely to), but I have to say it sounds immensely more pleasant than dealing with umlauts, ampersands, and asterisks.
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