General Password Construction Guidelines Sample Clauses

General Password Construction Guidelines. Passwords are used for various purposes at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Some of the more common uses include: user level accounts, web accounts, email accounts, screen saver protection, voicemail password, and local router logins. Since very few systems have support for one-time tokens (i.e., dynamic passwords which are only used once), everyone should be aware of how to select strong passwords. Poor, weak passwords have the following characteristics:  The password contains less than eight characters  The password is a word found in a dictionary (English or foreign)  The password is a common usage word such as: o Names of family, pets, friends, co-workers, fantasy characters, etc. o Computer terms and names, commands, sites, companies, hardware, software. o The words "University of Louisiana at Lafayette", "sanjose", "sanfran" or any derivation. o Birthdays and other personal information such as addresses and phone numbers. o Word or number patterns like aaabbb, qwerty, zyxwvuts, 123321, etc. o Any of the above spelled backwards. o Any of the above preceded or followed by a digit (e.g., secret1, 1secret) Strong passwords have the following characteristics:  Contain both upper and lower case characters (e.g., a-z, A-Z)  Have digits and punctuation characters as well as letters e.g., 0-9, !@#$%^&*()_+|~- =\`{}[]:";'<>?,./)  Are at least eight alphanumeric characters long.  Are not a word in any language, slang, dialect, jargon, etc.  Are not based on personal information, names of family, etc.  Passwords should never be written down or stored on-line. Try to create passwords that can be easily remembered. One way to do this is create a password based on a song title, affirmation, or other phrase. For example, the phrase might be: "This May Be One Way To Remember" and the password could be: "TmB1w2R!" or "Tmb1W>r~" or some other variation. NOTE: Do not use either of these examples as passwords!