How to choose a password?
The use of a strong password can protect you against password guessing or dictionary attacks. A good password should be easy to remember and hard to guess. The following are some guidelines for selection of a good password.
| DOs | DON'Ts |
|---|---|
| DO use a password with mixed upper and lower case letters. | DO NOT use the name of yourself, your family member or your pet as the password. |
| DO use a password that contains alphanumeric characters and punctuations | DO NOT use a word contained in English or foreign dictionaries, spelling, or other word / abbreviation lists |
| DO use at least eight characters for your password, longer the better | DO NOT use information that can be easily obtained about you (e.g. your ID card number, residential address, etc.). |
| DO use a password that can be typed quickly, without having to look at the keyboard. This makes it harder for someone to steal your password by looking at your keyboard (also known as "shoulder surfing"). | DO NOT use keyboard sequences, e.g. qwerty or asdfgh |
| DO NOT use a SAMPLE password, no matter how good, that you can find from a book or website (including this site!) |
Common Suggestions
- Use the first letter of each word from a sentence that you can easily remember, but hard to guess by others. For example: "Water is made of Hydrogen & Oxygen called H^2O" would produce "WimoH&OcH^2O"
- Connect short words by punctuations and replace letters with numbers. For example: "Is this a boy?" can be translated into "1s^Dis&a*B0y?"
A combination of different methods can also be used to generate a strong password. The aim is to avoid resulting passwords hard to remember and require to be written down.
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