A couple of recent articles I stumbled on , one in the Telegraph about people leaving Internet passwords in their wills, and the other I literally stumbled on in Stumbleupon about strong passport security have created a new project for me.
During the last seventeen years of working on Internet websites, using servers, hosting services, software development, social networks and all that stuff – I have ended up with thousands of passwords. At any one time I guess I have about ten popular ones in my memory, all use eight or more characters and a combination of numbers and upper/lower case letters. All are fairly simple to discover if someone has some basic skills. To get adequately secure I would need to replace them all with strings of over 24 characters.
To remember this, for me, would be impossible, I already write most down in a notebook, which if I lost it would be awkward. My browsers kindly remember most for me, but if the computer crashes (which they do and have done) – or if an unauthorised person gets on my network or keyboard, then the whole thing is useless.
The other aspect is, when I am dead, some of the stuff I have in various clouds, accounts and hard drives is needed to be accessed safely and simply – not that I have important or valuable stuff, but clients bookings, payments needed to be made and the pennies in paypal etc, need to be dealt with.
Putting passwords in a will is daft as you should be changing passwords regularly (I bet you don’t 🙂 ) – and do you want to give your accountant or lawyer access to you bank account after you die?
The PasswordCard idea seems elegant, highly secure and when the proverbial piano lands on your head, the person you trust only needs to know four things – a symbol a colour, how many characters you have in your password and the direction of the string (and to have your card of course). This information can be written down, but without the card it is useless and the card without this simple knowledge is also useless.
I am sure there are things I have not thought about, but I guess PasswordCard will think of these before I do. Or perhaps you will and comment to me 🙂
I do not plan to change all my passwords to one, I may have two or more cards or use different combinations on one card
