Security expert reveals surprising way to make your password stronger: use emojis
Security expert reveals surprising way to make your password stronger: use emojis
It turns out that emoticons are considered a symbol, so they can beef up your passwords and make them more secure in combination with letters and numbers. Here’s how.
Emojis are known to break systems in certain circumstances due to the way they're interpreted in certain character sets.
I guarantee people doing this will not only lock out their own accounts, but may even freeze some authentication servers.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-brick-an-iphone-send-some-emojis
No. There's only one piece of advice that should be given to users in 2023 about how to make their passwords stronger:
Use a password manager
Just use 32 character random alphanumeric passwords that are unique for each site (you can do more like 12-16 characters if you'll ever need to enter manually).
This is it. Stop trying to create clever passwords that you can remember. You aren't as uniquely creative as you think and there's been bodies of research into how the various things people do to create passwords that look secure can reduce the generation space so much that they become considerably easier to crack with an intelligent algorithm.
Oh for fuck's sake, just turn on 2FA
xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words
Until you get to a prompt that doesn't support unicode.
...no
I disagree with them.
- Emojis do not look the same on all platforms. Let's take
white large square⬜ for example. Emojipedia shows what that emoji looks like on 26 different vendors. Some are pure white, some are shades are grey, and then there's Microsoft who in its usual infinite wisdom decided it should be purple.large yellow square🟨 is a tossup between actually yellow and orange. This issue is also exacerbated with different displays displaying colours differently. Factors such as color accuracy, viewing angle, brightness affect how you perceive colour.
This also extends to face emojis.
grinning face with big eyes(Emojipedia link) isn't that easy to tell apart fromgrinning eyes(Emojipedia link)- Emoji support depends on your device. I'm on Windows 11 22H2 which recently added support for
shaking face🫨. Problem is, Windows' emoji pickerWin+.(period) doesn't have it. Trying to login on a friends phone that's still on iOS 15 or Android 12, beforeshaking facecame out? Enjoy manually copy/pasting the emoji from Emojipedia.
correct horse battery staple on the other hand looks the same on all devices.
- Emojis do not look the same on all platforms. Let's take
As a software developer who has worked with a lot of symbols and emoji... PLEASE DON'T DO THIS.
Software doesn't all handle these symbols the same way, and without tech knowledge (or even with) , it's very possible to not be able to log in easily. I'm kinda drunk rn, but I'll try to explain as simply as I can...
For example... skintone emojis are actually two characters, a face and a skin tone modifier. I think those ones are always two characters but some of these "multi-char" characters can be normalized into a single character. But not everyone handles this the same way. For example, Safari might normalize the emoji, but Firefox might treat it as two separate characters... And this would probably make your password not match. But basically... text has lots of edge cases; I'd advise to use normal passwords please (also maybe a password manager)
Grab a sentence you know well.
Pick just the first letter of each word.
It will look like it's random - for example "I like my lemmy only with beans and bacon" becomes "ilmlowbab" - and it comes from a far vaster possibility space (ever possible sentence and it need not even make sense) than that of "words in the English language and derived words" so it's a lot harder to try to crack with a dictionary attack.
Also it works in everything that takes ASCII charactes (i.e. everything but numeric only pin codes).
For petty services where you don't want to have to break out the password manager, try making your own mental salted hash.
Pick four long words at random. Assign each of these to the four quadrants of the alphabet.
A-F - Equipment
G-M - Triumphant
N-S - Sampling
U-Z - Fatigued
Pick one number:
4
Now, take the first letter of the service that the password is for, and that selects your quadrant word. Take the number of letters in the service and multiply it against your number. Take the last letter of the service, and on your querty keyboard, move all the way to the right of thst line to select the first symbol there. Thats your unique password thats salted with yo ur personal words and number.
Facebook = Equipment32:
Lemmy = Triumphant20{
Pizza Hut = Sampling36{
If you want more security for these petty services, use longer words, bigger number, or use some other metric, Tweak the algorithm to make it unique to you. Maybe capitalize a middle letter in your salt word based on the length of the service name. Maybe add the first letter of the colour of the service logo to the password, EG
Facebook = Equipment32:B
Lemmy = Triumphant20{T
Pizza Hut = Sampling36{R
Petty services I would consider to be anything that's not super critical, and is at a higher likelyhood of breaching my shit.
For banks, primary emails, or government services, use a more complex algorithm or a random string of chars from your password manager.
Anyone who takes any kind of advice from the fucking New York Post deserves what they get.
Havent read the article yet but If you have to manually input just stick to 6 or more randomly generated words (different languages if you would like to). A keyboard won't always have options for emojis. Your password manager's autofill/autotype everywhere else and 2fa where you can thats it dont overcomplicate things thats a good way to screw yourself over