Cars make good passwords
If you read my about page you'd know I work in technology. As a result, I try to maintain best practices when it comes to using technological tools professionally and personally and part of those best practices involves using a password manager (I personally use bitwarden). Now, this post is not meant to convince you to use a password manager (you should). Instead, this post is simply a recognition of the fact that cars make good passwords.
Now, when I say that cars make good passwords, I'm thinking along the lines of the famous xkcd comic. As the comic demonstrates, four random but common words make a better password than an uncommon word interjected with capitalization, punctuation, or other "clever" character substitutions. So, what does this have to do with cars? Well, as I'll demonstrate below you can pick four semi-random but easy to remember car-related words that create a memorable combination that are difficult to guess outright. To describe what I'm talking about, consider a list of potential passwords below:
- 1991Mazda787BLeMans
- 1986ToyotaLandCruiserJ60
- 4A-GEFormulaAtlantic1.6
- Ferrari250GTORed
- Cummins6BTNeverDie
- 1982DMCDeLorean88
- Kowalski1970DodgeChallenger
- 1963VolkswagenBeetleHerbie
- HoonicornV1KenBlock
- 390BullittFordMustang
Each phrase on this list is a combination of words (and in some cases even special characters) that likely resonates with any self-respecting gear head and also makes a strong password. To demonstrate this fact I plugged each password into an open source password strength tester from bitwarden:
And then I graphed the estimated time to crack each password. The results are shown below:
As you can see from the graph, many of these phrases make excellent passwords, given that it would take over 100+ years to crack some of them. However, some word combinations including:
- 390BullittFordMustang
- Cummins6BTNeverDie
- Ferrari250GTORed
could definitely be improved. I can only speculate but I imagine these passwords are less robust compared to others on the list because they use shorter and more common words with a combination of fewer special characters. Instead of using these words and trying to add more special characters or character substitutions (and wind up doing exactly what xkcd says not to) I'd just consider a different make or model, or maybe throw in a manufacture year. In case of the Ferrari250GTO password, including a year makes the password significantly more robust.
In conclusion classic or personally meaningful combinations of car makes, models, years, trim levels, body codes, engine codes… you name it can be combined to make strong and memorable passwords.