Does poetry hold the key to secure passwords?

http://news.usc.edu/87361/does-poetry-hold-the-key-to-more-secure-passwords/

The critical balance between security and memorability is famously elusive. Passwords tough enough to withstand an attack are impossible to memorize. The words and short phrases that agree to stay in our brains can be cracked in a matter of hours, if not minutes. From brilliant mathematicians to colorful cartoonists, some of our best minds have tried their hands at solving the persistent password problem.


Where they came up short, USC computational linguists may have succeeded. Harnessing a time-honored method of memorization, Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight from the USC Information Sciences Institute applied poetry to the problem. The result is memorable passwords that take more than 11 years to break. Such passwords promise to make online browsing, banking and shopping more secure, once people start using them.


Here’s how what Knight and Ghazvininejad call the “Poetry Method” works. Their program starts with a 32,000-word dictionary. Each entry is assigned a unique 15-bit code represented by 0s and 1s. The computer program then randomly creates a string of 60 0s and 1s and fits the words to it like a jigsaw puzzle. It chooses two words that rhyme and places them at the end of two very short sentences. The end product is a 16-syllable password that looks like this:


Sophisticated potentates
misrepresenting Emirates.


Or this:


The supervisor notified
the transportation nationwide.


Because they are randomly generated, these passwords can withstand modern hackers. Meter and rhyme make the randomness memorable.


“Poetry has rhythm and rhyme that can help people memorize the password better,” Ghazvininejad said. “I think people prefer to memorize passwords in poetry form, compared to some phrases.”

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Magdalen said:

0 ye who seek of me to hack
10 passage denied, get back jack!

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Right, we can do better than that random generator thingie! Maybe there's jobs in this.

Perks said:

Mnemonic device doesn't really equal poetry. It's a bit depressing that random word pilings are equated with a poem.

But it's nice to be able to remember your password.

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Yeah. Kind of like kid's jokes (the Stephen Colbert thread). Though there, the supposed poetry is legitimized by being claimed as part of a "meta" movement of some kind. This might qualify as well, only so far it's only engineers talking about it, instead of professors of English.

The point wasn't so much remembering them, I took it, but that they couldn't be cracked and were also memorable.

I write mine down.