Password Scheme

Here is how I used to create new passwords: I picked a starting idea, free associated from that about five times until I had something suitably random and about the right length (8-10 characters), converted some of the letters to leet, capitalized a letter, and reversed the characters. For example, I could start with “pillow”: “pillow” makes me think of “bed”, “bed” makes me think of “sheet”, and “sheet” makes me think of “sunlight”. I’ll stop there because “sunlight” is about the right length. “sunlight” becomes “5un716h7”, then “5uN716h7”, and then “7h617Nu5”. It’s utterly unrecognizable, but you can still sound it out if you read it backwards. If I forgot the password, I could recall the free associations I made to get the original word, then follow the same process to transform the word into the password, recalling the choices I made at each step. It’s surprising how easy it is to recover a password this way. In a sense, the secret behind the password isn’t the password itself, but the process to generate the password.