Passwords · Partial memory
I remember part of the password: why that changes everything
People arrive saying «I only remember a bit, so I suppose it’s no use». It is the exact opposite: that bit is what makes the entire case possible. The difference between remembering something and remembering nothing is not one of degree, it is one of kind.
Why a fragment is worth so much
A ten-character password of any kind gives a number of combinations no computer can traverse. But if you know it started with a specific word, you are no longer testing ten free characters: you are testing what came after. Every thing you remember cuts the search brutally, not proportionally.
| What you remember | Approximate possibilities |
|---|---|
| Nothing, any 10 characters | Out of reach |
| That it was a word plus 4 digits | tens of millions |
| Which word, plus 4 digits | 10,000 |
| Which word and that the number was a year | about 100 |
| Which word and which year, unsure of capitals | about 20 |
Look at the last two rows: those are cases solved in minutes. And what separates them from the first row is not remembering the password, it is remembering what it was like.
What counts as «remembering something»
Far more than you think. All of this is usable information:
- The approximate length, even if not exact.
- Whether it started with a capital or was all lowercase.
- Whether it had numbers, and whether they went at the start, the end or the middle.
- Whether it had a symbol, and which one you tended to use.
- Which words you used back then: names, cities, teams, bands.
- Whether it was in your own language or in English.
- The passwords you used elsewhere at the time, even if this isn’t one of them.
What not to do with what you remember
And don’t write that list on your phone or in the cloud. Paper, at home. How to organise it so it is genuinely useful is in how to build a candidate password list.