Beef Up Your Password by Memorizing a Few Key Codes

 

We've seen how easily weak passwords can be hacked, and we've also discussed how you can easily memorize or automatically generate and fill in secure passwords. Here's a great technique to add an extra layer of security to your
password.


If you're a Windows geek, you may be familiar with the Alt + numeric pad key combination that creates ASCII and Unicode characters which are not present on a regular keyboard.
These characters are less frequently included in brute force or dictionary attacks, which can act as first line of defense for your password against cracking. Many keyloggers would also not be able to log most of the characters from the ASCII code chart, which would render them useless.
Update: As some readers have pointed out, not all of the codes available to Windows Alt+key code combinations are ASCII—some are non-ASCII codes, which can work, but are sometimes not supported by web sites. They'll still add extra obscurity to your password, but you would not want to use an all non-ASCII password.
If someone tried to guess your password and you have any ASCII character in it, they would need to know the exact key combination for that character before they get anywhere. In a way, the ASCII codes act as a password for your password.

Here is how it works:

When you press Alt + 16 in any text field in Windows, it will create a ► character and pressing Alt + 17 on the num pad gives a ◄. Go ahead, open up notepad and try it out or just open the Run dialog and try out any Alt + number combination.
I generally use a single ASCII character at the start and end of the password. So it looks something like ►mypassword◄.




ASCII characters are part of the US-ASCII code, which is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or any key combination we use. Since these characters are recognized by all applications on Windows, they can be used anywhere. Including a couple of characters from the ASCII table in your password allows us to create some really tough passwords to crack