Methods of generating strong passwords

I'm curious what other methods people use to create strong passwords. My personal favorite is something I thought up myself but I'm sure I'm not the only one. First I think up a long and ridiculous sentence or 3 with a smattering of proper nouns for mixed case, numbers for well numbers and a bit of punctuation. Then I take the 1st letter from each word, all of the numbers and symbols and use that as my password. For example the sentence: My mother, Gertrude Chocolate, is a nice woman with 57,238 chickens which dance the night away @ Ken Bacon's house at 127 Richmond Dr. which is across the street from Phil's House of Sushi!
Gives the password: Mm,GC,ianww57,238cwdtna@KB'ha127RD.wiatsfP'HoS!

I think I'm a wee bit paranoid considering I have unique passwords like this for a good % of my logins.

Well, I can't see that particular style of password getting hacked. But how do you remember all that? My head would 'asplode.

Honestly the sillyness helps a lot and the cohesiveness of a sentence. The fact that it is a "meaningful" sequence helps me to remember it as well as the previous word reminds me of the next. Basically all I have to remember is one thing: the sentence.

Still... dang!

And what do you do when you're confronted with a site that only has a limit on the size of your password? Smaller sentences?

I choose names out of the phonebook at random. Then I take the letters and transform them into numbers, then convert from decimal to another set of numbers using base 6 notation.

By this time, I've forgotten completely what I've started out with...so I go back to my old standby, a confusing babble of letters and digits that spells out the name of my personal saviour, Johnny Cash. DOH!

one bar of lyrics from a favourite song, with punctuation

turning letters into numbers isn't all that for password quality btw

big fan of the apple keychain utility for its password strength indicator, and the command line tool pwgen for one time use/making passwords for clients etc

[Edited on Aug 30, 2005 by sawks]

I had a friend who used this method.
However, he found one he thought was very clever and started using it for all his passwords.

iftl&tl1

[Edited on Aug 30, 2005 by Phased]

http://www.winguides.com/security/password.php

This makes 6-64 character somewhat pronounceable passwords that you can then sprinkle with numbers if you like. They not only beat dictionary attacks, but they are surprisingly easy to remember. I can even remember previous ones that I've since changed. Examples:

swiastle

zoebietr

choutlad

drluchia

A password as long as the one you're using is pretty impractical. I'm glad you can remember it, but most people have trouble with a standard 8 character one. That makes them do things like write it on the back of their keyboard.

8 characters with a couple of numbers is fine for most web apps.

The only password you'll ever need is hunter2.

i just randomly plug in 8-10 characters of random numbers, letters, and symbols. (I have them written down on a piece of paper until I memorize them.) I have a bunch of different ones. One for IMs, SG, Credit Card, Banking, Email, Forums, general unimportant stuff like photobucket.

I just use my birthday. Nobody ever remembers my birthday.

I use pass phrases. Easy to remember very secure. Welcometothejungl3! is a 19 character password, the time required to hack that using massively distributed computing is longer than any data I may have is valuable.

Not here, but I used to constantly rotate Autechre song titles a lot, because I figured the only other people who would recognize them could probably just hack into whatever program I was using anyway, if they really wanted to get into it...

same. i generally pick phrases from my favorite poems or books and make them 20-30 chars long. easy to remember and type, but hell on wheels to brute force.

classic.

perfect!

*hunkers down to e-stalk PRockG*

I have a net worth of about fifty dollars.

man...if I buy you, willl that make you like my servant?

Dude. That'd be fuckin' cool!

Oh. Wait. Is that like 50 bucks US? Friggin' exchange rates...

My voice is my passport verify me.

If you are going to bother with being that paranoid then just start using biometrics and certs. I would suggest a vein scanner and a standard 128 CAC. That should simplify your life a bit.

[Edited on Aug 30, 2005 by Shinigami]

That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!

[Edited on Aug 30, 2005 by Vauxhall]

Pick a Suicide Girl's name. Then add a number everytime you chang it.

Missy1
Missy2
Missy3

Olivia1
Olivia2
Olivia3

This is not how I pick mine.

Is that a Suicide Girl sticker on the tank of the yellow minibike?

*snort* The Jacksons just aren't that cool. Awesome afros though.

If you don't mind long passwords ,Diceware is a good method. Basically you throw a die a number of times, giving you a code like 12623 then you look up the corresponding word in the list, repeat say five or seven times and you have a passphrase that makes absolutely no sense which makes it impossible to guess and too big to brute force. Memorizing it is harder than remembering the name of your dog, but that's the price you pay for security.

Generally, I go for a song by one of my favourite bands. Or my lucky numbers