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Ask HN: What pattern you use to choose your passwords?

1 points by channi ↗ HN
I am developing a tool which would guess what kind of passwords someone might choose by mining their social profiles (facebook for now). I have surveyed my friend circle for some patterns they choose. e.g one of my friends use his one of his siblings' name along with his, replace some characters with special chars (a with @ or 4).

Please help me telling what pattern you use to choose your passwords.

Any suggestions for making such tool are welcome.

5 comments

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johnbeynu
Do you also want my DOB and credit card number?
gmuslera
Easy, just try "123456" and "password" (or the top 10 of the the biggest password breachs at a given time), you will have a great hit ratio in a random sample of people.

Try reading Asimov's Foundation. You can't predict individuals, but given enough number of people, you will get a great trend hinting. And if the group you try to predict have some password culture on it (like this community), you should not be able to guess, even simple algorithms for passwords like the xkcd ones are pretty safe to random guessing.

inetsee
I use a password generator "http://passhash.connorhd.co.uk/" that generates random 12 character passwords with uppercase, lowercase and digits. If you can design software that can guess those passwords, you should work on something more challenging, like predicting the stock market or creating a friendly AI.