Requires Free Membership to View
When you register, you'll receive targeted emails designed to keep you informed of the most relevant information on Agile development, application security, testing & QA, software requirements, and more.
Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director
Key fobs and other methods of two-factor authentication are definitely great if these are feasible solutions in your environment. However, there is a way to increase password security and do it in a quick and reasonable time frame that most people don't think about. That is to turn passwords into passphrases. Implement a password change policy that has only one restriction – length of password. Make the minimum password length of 15 characters or greater, but add no other restrictions. Let the user do all lowercase letters if they want. Give examples in your policy of 'passphrases'. Something like 'thisismyreallylongpassword' or 'igetupat6amandgettoworkat9' or 'wowmymachineisreallyslow'. Implementing this is simple and quick and will increase your password security 100 fold.
More information:This was first published in January 2007