In any given password, you can determine the number of possiblities that hide the correct answer with the simple formula n = (v^p) -1 ; where n is the number of possibilities, p is the number of characters in the password, and v is the number of possible values for each character.

Therefore, a good password needs to have lots of characters in it, and make full use of the possible values in each character. Now, how do you make a password which does this, is easy to remember, and doesn't use an obvious linguistic pattern that can be exploited with brute force? People don't like to remember huge complicated strings of letters and numbers, and no one puts up with the annoyance.


Here's my "How to make a password" tutorial:

Instead of using a "password", make a "passpattern". Take a look at how this password would be typed into your computer: qwSDcvGHyuJK7856 (it looks like a wave)
Instead of trying to memorize the string of characters, just remember the pattern your fingers made on the keyboard. To make the thing really hard to crack, add a flaw to the pattern.

Let's take a look at how hard it would be to crack:

26 letters in the alphabet, double that because you used caps, and add 10 for the numeric digits. There are 62 possibilities for each character. Our password is 16 digits long.
62^16 = 47672401706823533450263330815 possible wrong answers. Even if you could test a thousand million possibilities every second, you wouldn't be able to check every answer for billions of years. A dictionary-based attack fares even worse- you're not using words. Social Profiling doesn't work here... the password doesn't have a connection to your life in any way.

The downside: Passwords generated like this are much more vulnerable to "shoulder-surfers", since they operate visually.

Please post any other good password generation techniques you have.