Password Management for Anyone!

There is a simple system of managing passwords that anyone can use, which lets you write down your password (in effect) and which is completely secure.

The password is based on a pattern that only you know and can be summarized so that only you can reconstruct the password.

A password could be X8june9Y which is based on 2 patterns of paired letters and numbers and a month. The letter pair here is X and Y, the number pair is 8 and 9 and june which is a month.

So this would be summarized by X8bill and reconstructed by knowing that:
-- X is matched by Y and forms the outer letters
-- 8 is matched by 9 and forms the inner numbers
-- bill is replaced by his birthday month and goes in the middle.

Or you could have P2sis. The P gives P and Q, the 2 gives 2 and 3 and sis gives the birthday month of your sister: aug. Put this in the pattern and you get: P2aug3Q.

This is only one pattern, you could equally have had P2sis generate: P2augQ3sept, p2AUGq3SEPT or PQR234aug. The more complicated your pattern is, the harder it is for a hacker to break -- but that's unlikely to happen to the average Joe. The simplest pattern here is sufficiently complex for most uses in that it uses letters, numbers and mixed case.

The important thing is that you pick one pattern and make sure you don't forget it.