Encryption, Security, Passwords

If you are a hip, with-it, web 2.0 person, you probably have more online IDs and passwords than you can shake a stick at¹. I do. Sitting here in front of my computer, I can think of 15 without breaking a mental sweat. To simplify my life, I’d been basically keeping the same user ID and password for everything, to avoid having a long list of passwords sitting around for someone to find. Unfortunately, there are numerous websites that don’t allow my standard password (which has special characters²). Some modifications were called for. To date, I’d really only needed to remember 3 or 4 different variations on my password theme.

Then I read Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow (great book, by the way), and I kicked off a huge security revamp on my online life. I generally now have different passwords for everything, although I’m keeping the same user ID.

This raises the question of how I’m going to remember all of these (strong) new passwords. An example of one I use would be “yelling@OutLoud294&+”, which is hard to figure out but easy to forget. Thankfully, TrueCrypt, a free, open-source encryption software lets you encrypt bits and pieces of your hard drive where you can place those passwords.

But wait! What happens if you’re travelling and you want to log in to your bank account? Therein lies my woefully unused thumb drive, pictured here.

After ridding the drive of the terribly annoying U3 software³ I turned half of the 1gb thumb drive into an encrypted volume that lets me use it like a regular drive space once I’ve “mounted” it with the encryption password. So, I essentially have a 1/2 gb thumbdrive worth of free space for regular document transport and a 1/2 gb thumbdrive to which I need a password for access. Remembering one crazy password is easier than 15.

One of the nice things about TrueCrypt is that you can load the executables onto your portable drive; whatever computer you plug into won’t need to have TrueCrypt installed as long as you have those files.

So, now you know where to go to find all of my passwords. You still need to torture me for the encryption key, though.

¹What does that phrase really mean, anyway?
²This list includes some finanicial websites that really should know better: Bank of America, American Express, Fidelity, US Department of Education, for a few. Not permitting me to use strong passwords does not give me a warm fuzzy about my security.
³This software crashed my home computer every single time I plugged in.