Your passwords may soon get a lot longer, but they’ll be much easier to remember

With new guidelines from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, we will soon, hopefully, see the elimination of older, outdated standards such as frequent password changes and utilizing special characters.  These guidelines will affect both government and business passwords.

Because humans have limited memory capabilities, having to recall long, complicated strings of characters are often impossible and therefore many users just use simple passwords that are easily guessed.  Studies have also shown that there is negligible benefit for these more complex passwords at the expense of usability and memorability.

The possible solution?  New guidelines allowing for the ending of special characters, longer passwords of up to 64 characters which can include spaces.  This will open the door to passwords being created around strings of words or phrases which are easier for humans to remember but harder for computers to guess. 

Till this new rollout of password standards, if you need help or advice on how to better manage the dozens of passwords you have to deal with on a daily basis, just contact Optfinity today and we can provide you with several options.