4.3 Best gnu-pw-mgr practices

Try out several password id transforms before changing all your passwords on all your sites. You may decide it is too hard or too easy and want to change it. However, once you have gone to the trouble of changing the passwords on a lot of sites, you won’t be especially eager to do it again. So, play with it on one site you use a lot, change the password a lot as you change the transform and then make a good decision.

Once you need to or are required to change a password, simply specify a new “–use-pbkdf2” value for that password id. You may see its current value by specifying “–status”.

When choosing your password id transform, use things that you can easily remember. Especially if some nonsense thing can be easily remembered. Separate the components with unusual things like multiple punctuation characters. Do odd things with the top level domain. cApitaliZe strangely. Use a slightly different transform for financial institutions. If someone gets ahold of your seed file, you want to hope that a dictionary attack will not be readily successful.

But lastly and most important: be sure you can remember your transform(s). If you forget, your password is gone. So choose what you can remember and be consistent.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on June 30, 2018 using texi2html 1.82.