Tired of remembering complicated passwords?

My colleague Mat showed me a nice little trick today. Say you are bored or tired of using different password in all your websites you use, or maybe you don’t want to use the same password on these sites. Simple and easy if you use a Linux computer. You only have to use, and more importantly remember, simple words or combination and a little command in the shell to generate a really difficult to guess password.

Say you want to access your Google account and you want to use google as the password. So I’ll go and use the SHA hash algorithm to generate an interesting password like:

$ echo "google" | sha1sum
d662cc72cfed7244a88a7360add85d5627b9cd6c  -

Or just go and use your hash algorithm of choice. And if it’s too long for the website you want to use, get the 10 first characters or something.

% echo "google" | sha1sum | cut -c1-10
d662cc72cf

And that’s it, copy and paste and you are done. Yes, it’s a bit of a faff, but, well, you want something secure, don’t you?

Simply brilliant. Thanks Mat.