I was reading some articles on the security blog of stackexchange. Ended up there reading articles/comments from Thomas Pornin who is one of the best answerer on stackoverflow.

I ran into this one intitled Is our entire password strategy flawed?

I wanted to bring my point of view on how to deal with multiple passwords. I don’t necessarily do this because it’s not practical but I’m trying more and more.

So if I were to be extremely paranoiac I would:

1. use a password manager like 1Password for websites you don’t really care.
2. use passwords you memorise for websites you care about.
3. use multi-factor authentification for critical websites.

1. Password Manager

I’ve never used 1Password but it seems to generate passwords on the fly when you need to sign up on a new website. It’s pretty cool! But a problem arises when you need to login on some website when you’re not using your computer. If you don’t know the passwords it created then you will always be dependent of this password manager.

2. Memorise

A good idea would be to hash the name of the website + some salt only you know, and use it as a password. All of that in your head. That’s what one of the famous Blum proposes. More here. He appeared to have invented a hash you could compute mentally.

3. Two-Factor Authentification

I really like the yubikey (and own one). It’s literally a secret key. Every time I need to log into gmail from a cybercafe I wish I had it configured with my yubikey.

Bonus

By the way, if you’re scared there might be a keylogger but really have to enter some password you could prey on the fact that the keylogger is badly coded and, when entering your password, could move to another input field and write random words, then come back to the password input field and type some more letters of your password, etc.. . Last year I also learned how to read dotsies (I completely forgot how to read it now though…) and I seldom switched all the fonts to dotsies so no one could look over my shoulder and read what I was reading/typing.