Many of us have more passwords than we can handle. I about ten I need to use for work. I have 15+ I use at home and with various services. 25 passwords, all of them different are quite difficult to remember.
In a recent slashdot discussion, Password Security Not Easy, nizo posted a method of creating a matrix of characters that allows you have short, easy to remember passwords, with a key to translate that password into a long, complex, encrypted password. Print it onto something the size of a business card, laminate it, and stick it in your wallet.
I’ve developed a little php script that does something similar, but makes it more likely you’ll get a combination of characters with numbers and special characters (required by many password systems), provides more characters per letter, and provides codes for numbers as well. You can run it or get the source.
You might want to change the font to one that makes it easy to tell the difference between O and 0 and I, l, and 1 (fixed width, vga/terminal/ocr fonts seem to be best at this). - You can force this in your browser, or download the source and change it to run on your own server - the code is released to the public domain, so do with it what you wish. Any ideas on how to improve it are welcome.
