Choosing a good password

A good password should have the following properties:

• At least 8 characters so that the password will be difficult to guess using a brute-force approach. The minimum length of a password accepted by KeyPass is 6 characters.

• Include both letters and numbers to make the password even harder to guess.

• Should not be a normal word that you can find in the dictionary, otherwise this will make the intruder's job much easier.

• Should not be something personal eg. birth date or wife's name for the same reason.

• Unless you have photographic memory, the password should not be completely random eg. "8Hsj3hd5", otherwise you will forget it easily.

The last point runs counter to the other four. For a password to be easy to remember, it should be familiar in some ways. However, what is easy for you to remember will also make it easier for a potential intruder to crack.

Here are some suggestions for meshing together familiar items to form a password so that the final result will still be easy to remember, but much harder to guess:

• Take a familiar word and date, and mingle them. For example if your daughter's name is "Jenny", and her birth date is Jul 2, 1986, one possible combination is "Jen19860702ny".

• Another possibility is to take a familiar phrase and number, and mingle them. For example, if your wife' favorite phrase is "Just kidding!", and your favorite number is 21, one possible combination is "Just21Kidding".

• Yet another possibility is to take a familiar phrase and number, and break them both before recombining. For example, if your favorite singer is Elvis Presley, and your car plate number is 7623, one possible combination is Elvis76Presley23.

Please remember that your password is case-sensitive. Hence, "MyPassword" is not equivalent to "mypassword".

There is absolutely no way to recover information from the encrypted database once your master password is lost! So choose your password carefully to minimize the chances of forgetting it.