Threat level: yellow

wikimedia

I'm sure you have a lot of usernames and passwords---I know I do. My security model has four threat levels: green, yellow, orange and red.

green: the same password for all

yellow: a different strong password for each one; written in an encrypted text file and transferred on a thumb drive

orange: a strong password that I remember

red: a password on paper, in a file cabinet that I control; orange passwords also stored here

Level red is for banking; orange for my laptop that requires a logon at boot. I allow the Keychain to store passwords for level yellow.

The problem is how to generate a lot of strong passwords. Python is great for this:

import sys, random, string cL = string.letters + string.digits cL += '@#$%&*' def go(N): L = [random.choice(cL) for i in range(N)] return ''.join(L) try: N = int(sys.argv[1]) except IndexError, ValueError: N = 24 print go(N) ''' $ python password.py 50 k5YHStb@&L4OHW4NV6fGaohDLGg8nyVYbsTRyV4aIRTTb41ob1 '''