Unique passwords for every different website!
Key points:
Do you use a single password everywhere? A 2019 online survey by Google shows that 65% of people use the same password for multiple/all accounts.
But this poses a huge security risk; suppose if a hacker or cyber attacker got access to just one account's password, then the security of all the accounts is at stake.
And there is another risk of reusing passwords; if you created a new account on an "untrusted" website with the same password, then the website knows your password for other accounts too! (A trusted and secured website perform hashing, which makes the password unknown to that website; but an untrusted website may/maynot perform hashing).
Solving the password reuse problem
This post explores a very innovative solution to the password reuse problem. But let's look at other solutions. There are password wallets, and even the web-browsers stores your password when signing up on a website. And from the last some months, Mozilla Firefox added an inbuilt password suggester, which will suggest you a new random password when signing up.
Making use of a pattern/algorithm to remember passwords
Obviously, nobody can remember hundreds of unique passwords for every website. But we can remember an algorithm or a pattern that will give us a password whenever we need to sign-in/sign-up on a website.
But what should be the basis of this pattern, it should be unique to every website and maybe easy to remember!. We can use the domain name of the website as the basis.
https://www.google.com/
An example, Let's generate every password as follows:
The password is = (the first character of the domain left shifted by 1) + ("3treEes") + (the second character of the domain right shifted by 2).
So, for example the password for "google.com" would be "f3treEesq"; similarly the password for "facebook.com" would be "e3treEesc".
In this way we can use unique passwords for every different website, and we don't even need to remember any of those. We only need to remember a domain name based pattern. This will significantly improves the security. And the security level depends on what pattern we are using, the above example gives 529 different passwords.