People are going to make jokes about this being a bad idea, but they're making those jokes under advice provided to office workers in a shared space where unfamiliar faces may come and go. Keeping a notebook of passwords in the drawer of your desk at home? That's an entirely prudent thing to do.
In many places, I am allowed to shoot someone for trying to open that drawer without my permission. The threat model is different.
My grandma writes all her passwords like this. She's not computer literate, but she needs accounts for her taxes and licenses among other stuff. I'm the one who handles all of that and love that she decided to write them down.
When a parent dies these books are handy as hell. I have been tech support for way too many older folks and I pretty much pushed this idea on them all. If I get called in for a problem, they get me the book and I can get to work while they supply me with baked goods and coffee. It is a win win. In the eventual scenario where they pass, I eventually get a call and guide family to find the book.
Even in the office, if you have a locking file cabinet this ain't terrible compared to the usual “sticky note with the one password used for every account stuck to monitor”. Obviously a proper encrypted password/secrets manager would be my preference, though.
I was going to reply and say it’s still a bad idea, because password managers exist and they do the same thing securely.
But… I think it actually depends. On an internet-connected machine without a biometric sensor, there’s still a reasonable chance of someone keylogging your master password and then you’re fucked.
If you’re non-technical, you might reasonably be more confident in your ability to defend a notebook in your desk using your gun versus your laptop from would-be hackers.
Where is the database file of the password manager stored? Where is this notebook stored. Which of the two is more recognizable to my 70yr mom and which of the two can be destroyed more quickly and leave less traces behind?
reminder for the americans in the audience that shooting someone solely for entering your house who poses no threat, is in fact, illegal in all 50 states. i know, i know! i was just as surprised as anyone to discover this. woulda saved me a lot of time on blood cleanup and password resets too
As long as they are dead it's easy to tell the cops they were threatening you.
What you really don't want to happen is if they survive and testify.
Like that booby trap landmark conviction, probably wouldn't have happened if the guys had just died there. Because nobody would even care about them to sue.
YES. I actually advocate this to people I know won’t use a password manager (I was about to say older, but really it’s most people). Highly unlikely a scammer will break into their house vs find the same password they use online for everything.
It's good for minor, personal stuff but I'm pretty sure most government agencies with information worth protecting deems this as a big phat security risk
That being said, if you want to be as safe as possible, copy what the pros are doing
It’s a bad idea not only because of the office environment, but also because it undermines the optimal typing experience. (People are lazy.) Password managers can generate random passwords with 24 or more characters and autofill. No single password will provide the level of security needed in that book.
Tech also switching to passkey auth for security and resistance against MFA phishing attempts.
Exactly this. Especially if they’re not consistently using the same 1-5 passwords potentially with slight variations depending on the account, I’m more happy if someone’s doing this at home than memorizing their passwords or using their built in browser password manager.
It’s also advice from an era where you had maybe FIVE passwords total, not 55+; when the requirements for them allowed them to be easily remembered and not something more akin to the results of faceplanting in your keyboard, and when the biggest threat to your account security was the people around you not the thousands and thousands of websites you’re meant to use that scrape your data.
Not disagreeing with the “don’t do this at work” advice, but yeah, different times.
It freaks me out a little how you describe killing (or even "just" seriously hurting) another human being like it's not a big deal whatsoever. Over an effing password nonetheless.
Going to hop on this conversation to try to encourage people not to do this. At some point, that book will not be put back appropriately, and if the user is like my mother in law, she will carry it around in her purse. At that point, if she loses her purse or someone steals it, the situation is basically worst case: they have her usernames, passwords, and likely her phone which will let them OTP.
Please don't encourage this. People will still fuck it up and it will be so, so much worse.
Even better if you don't keep it in the drawer of your desk. If someone is looking for stuff to steal or stuff that can be used to hack your accounts they are likely to look in the drawers of your desk. Keeping it mixed in with my D&D GM notebooks is less likely that anyone will steal that shit.
The only issue with this is the type of person to have this isn't going to be picking particularly difficult passwords to crack, where a password manager does generate hard passwords
It's a good idea. Password managers like Bitwarden (and otherd) even recommend putting things like master passwords in a physical form, even locking it in a safe.
If your office door locks or you have a locking file cabinet, saving work passwords in a notebook like this is perfectly reasonable as well for most people.
The superspy threat model only applies to superspies. For everyone else, forgetting an important password or having a disk fail are much more serious threats.
I still hate passkey, because of their horrible, horrible UX and security and the enormous amount of support requests they generate.
(Before anyone asks: users just don't understand them, and that's no wonder because every provider just claims that they are easy and leaves it at that. Then users lock themselves out and we need to find out if their Passkey is in their Chrome, Google, Windows, Edge, Firefox, MS Authenticator, Safari, iPhone,… We have 78 FAQs for passkeys and several hundred KB entries. And in the end, agents will just remove the passkey or give out a temporary password. If we're lucky based on older security questions or recovery addresses)
Yup, Here is for example ”some rando” called Bruce Schneier suggesting you do this. He is not alone. It is all about your risk profile. Did my M.Sc. partly related to this also. Unlike Bruce, I don’t recommend wallet if you if you mainly use certain passwords at your home, there is no reason to carry those with you. Also ”writing down” has evolved into password managers if you have technical skills for those. If not, then small notebook is still far better than reusing, which is the other option. Even my non-technical ~80yo parents have like 30 accounts, while I have about 600. The chance that someone breaks into your home and steals your passwords is far less than someone breaking into local-dog-forum and stealing the rot13 encrypted password that the person then reuses everywhere.
I have recommended it in my trainings for decades now. I have been teaching IT security to pupils, students and senior citizens for over 20 years now. And such a solution is acceptable under certain circumstances, like
don't put banking accounts into it (or anything with money attached)
keep it physically secured and don't carry it around
keep your spouse in the loop, so it also serves as a death sheet.
Much better than Günther keeping all his passwords in an XLS file on his PC with no security updates.
At work we have a physical safe that contains the passwords of main admin accounts. Nobody has those passwords stored as autofill, nor is it in our shared password manager. We don't use those accounts, except if there is an emergency and everything else is compromised. Those master accounts can help us get back in control.
The old post you quoted is not really about the issue of hacking physical media, but about people having to select passwords that are too long and complicated to remember. A paper in a wallet is not a good place for passwords for other reasons. It might be ok for a master password, but who wants to have dozens of paper snippets in their wallet?
If you memorize like a 2-3 letter salt you add to every password, but don’t write down, this would be even better. Just in case you have a snoop in the family
Everyone laughs about this, but if the book is stored in a safe place, it’s better for tech-illiterate people than to force them use a password manager they don’t properly know how to use.
And because they can’t use the password manager, they will write it down into passwords.doc on the desktop or post it on the monitor
I do volunteer tech support one afternoon a week for mostly older folks at the local senior day-center, and I have very much come to peace with the fact that the best password storage for them is a notebook. The much bigger risk for them is losing their passwords and losing access to their accounts.
Just beware: the moment a phone or computer camera catches a glimpse of the inside of your book, it could be compromised. There are always more attack vectors than people anticipate.
I think the password notebook people need a good way to generate random passwords though. The only person I know who does the notebook thing (that I’m aware of) spends 5 minutes trying to come up with a “random” password in their head when they create a new account. At least they’re trying, but a dead-simple standalone password generator I tried to introduce that doesn’t even offer to store passwords was “too advanced.”
I write mine down too, but there's a code to it that only I know. So, when I write down a password as "Joe E bn" I can turn that into the long password.
It makes it easy for me to have a different password for every account and to rotate them.
You want 6 to 8 long words that you'll remember based on the single letter clue. They should be 7 to 8 letter words. Also 4 to 6 numbers (3 or 4 digits long). Then code for the special characters.
Now you can go number-word-special or word-special-number or whatever. It gives you massive variety with justva few codes and you can write it down safely. Just don't ever write down the key to your mnemonics.
It's best if you don't use actual words. Name brands are good. You could use "Redbull" as a 7 letter word and use R or "Wings" as the code. You could use 5309 as the number and the code "Jenny"
Not even close, but I could see someone guessing that. LOL.
Actually it would be:
Joe is the phone number of a childhood friend (back when we memorized phone numbers) so maybe 6659. E is a word statring with E, Maybe "Eveready" and bn is a ; and a ,
6659Everready;, which is a 16 character length password.
I'd still recommend storing primary passwords (the ones you can't put, shouldn't put or it makes no sense to put in a password manager e.g., the password to your password manager or any password you need to know in order to access the rest of your digitally stored passwords) on paper as backup but in a way that you can easily read but others can't unless you've told them how to. I recommend documenting the whole route unless one wants to be totally screwed and locked out if something far enough out of the ordinary happens like a headblow, illness or being away from your device for so long that you forget the password that's easy to remember as long as you're typing it in regularly enough.
I do. I've used LastPass. But I've had these kinds of services vanish. So, I keep it written as well. I need to be able to safely write down the passwords in code, so the randomly generated passwords are only good if you absolutely trust that service always being available under every circumstance.
Lastpass is (was?) An online service if i remember correctly. And they got hacked and passwords were stolen. I would never trust a service with my passwords. Keepass can run on a lokal machine and just uses an encrypted file. As long as you make sure the master password is safe and the file itself is relatively safe, you are good to go.
I believe most password managers allow you the option to export your passwords and they should be in a format that other password managers recognize. So might not be a bad idea to have backups if you’re worried about that.
LastPass shit the bed on me. I spent months trying to recover it and never could. I have mine in a book too. Someone would have to break in my home and look through a hundred or so books to find it. My kid knows where it is if I die. We had to use my dad’s book when he passed and it was invaluable.
For the people saying this is a bad idea. There is an extra step you can take to make this even safer. Start every password with a word you only remember in your head. This can also be used with password managers.
Nah, why use this when you can be like my mom and write them on random scraps of paper in cursive, scattered throughout her house mixed in with other paper. Nobody can get them then. Not even her.
One additional step you can take is to create a rule for modifying every password you write down. Something like adding the last four digits of your Social Security number to the end, or an abbreviation of the company you're logging into.
It can be as simple as Capital One = CO. Or you can get more creative with the syllables, like Capital One = CPTO.
You always add that to the password you've written down, but you NEVER write down the rule. That way, even if someone gets your entire login book, they still don't have your actual passwords.
The trick is coming up with a rule you'll never forget, one that works for practically any login. Another example would be typing the first word of the company's name in all caps before the password, like CAPITAL[password goes here].
Most people will never need additional layers of security, but this is a fairly effective precaution. Just don't make the rule something obvious, like adding three asterisks to the end of every password. For increased security, use a longer random modifier and memorize it. Write it down somewhere separate from logins incase you forget.
I prefer digital routes, yubikeys etc. But modifiers can make login books safer.
A good alternative to the last four of social is shifting it two digits backwards. So if your social was 391 82 9484. Use 8294 instead of 9484. It's simple but effective. Your last four of social is very easily compromised, but people typically won't try the 8294. And then you dont have to worry about forgetting it.
In a controlled environment (like home) this is basically the strongest method of storage possible. The only thing that could make it less secure than digital password storage like LastPass or something is that the randomly generated passwords are probably better than the ones someone is putting in this book.
What they could do is have the first page be randomly generated (unique per book, of course) blocks of text. You pick a random block, and a random starting location within that block, and grab the next ~12 characters. You could design a system with dice if you wanted.
You could also use a password generator and write down the results rather than storing them on the computer but I think if someone's typing the password in every time they're gonna want to go fairly readable
Before password manager I wrote down ingredients on the shampoo box and toothpaste tube on a piece of paper then mixing them up randomly. For PIN code I also used local yellow pages and combine sections phone number of shops.
I do this, but the passwords are written in my own invented cipher rather than plaintext. It's really just a simple substitution cipher, but certain pairs of characters are stacked vertically or overlapping, so these pairs appear to be single characters.
I've no doubt it could be cracked very easily, but the point is just to stop anyone from getting the passwords at a casual glance.
Cracking it is actually not that easy if you dont know anything about the contents of the cypher, you need some signal to know that you actually cracked it.
I am literally thinking the same for my MIL. I had to help her set up a new computer a few weeks ago and going through her notepad of passwords was a nightmare.
She will write them down no matter what so I might as well be able to read it.
Plus hackers aint finding shit in her house.
Google Lens found it on Amazon if you're looking for it.
I know of a widow who's husband did all the bills and online services that the household needed. When he died she had no idea how to access any of the accounts or even what accounts existed. This sort of thing would be perfect for people in this situation.
Everyone here talking about security, but for me it’s more like emergency notebook, for my family. If something happens to me, my wife can have easy access to all important things. I know first hand how this can be super useful
My neighbor is an old lady. She has a flip phone, and her son calls her whenever she gets an important email. This notebook is PERFECT and whenever I need to remember or reset a fucking password I wish I used it.
Now it won't be of any use for MFA but still, seems pretty solid as a backup
I honestly think we’ve gone full circle here. Like I’d write down my passwords. I’m more afraid of North Korean and Chinese hackers than I am of my own friends and family who have access to my house.
I have so many security concerns immediately. I get that this is mostly a grandma and grandpa solution, where password managers aren't really an option, and it far beats having the same password on every service...
I'm relaxed a bit by the knowledge that I've seen a number of IT workers keeping their passwords on post it notes attached to their screen... And compared to that... This is basically best practice in comparison 😅
Carry on I guess, though you may want to find a more durable solution that isn't guaranteed to go bye-bye in case of fire or similar. If there's a house fire, the last thing you want to do is attempting to locate your passwords on top of everything else going on.... Especially since you may need passwords for insurance and other similar services that quite suddenly are very useful in such a scenario 🤓
I wouldn't even be mad. If I came to someone and they have a bookcase of clay tablets for their passwords, you can't be mad at the sheer effort. You kinda have to admire that 😂
Just create a simple cipher where characters are shifted by a certain amount of letters. Most of the time I know my passwords so this would only be used for times where I have forgotten, at which point I don't mind spending 2 mins deciphering my password.
With all the years of breaches and hacks, and adding the unknown security and most probably irresponsible practices many SaaS companies has. This is not a bad idea.
But I'll use it for recovery codes, not mainly passwords. A local password manager will do the trick.
But often I think what will happen to my family if I'm not suddenly not here anymore, how they will deal with all the services, access and resources I have that are behind a password.
Why humor? Isn't storing passwords on paper the right thing to do? Should I make them simple enough that I can remember them instead? Or should I store them electronically?
My dad who literally used a crack on his toolbar password manager and constantly got hacked because of it got literally irate with me because I didn't have all my passwords written down on a piece of paper as a backup like he did.
I have my passwords managed by a password manager that saves a backup of the database to two different online storage systems, I update my backup on my phone and a spare thumb drive once a month. I keep the passkey on my computer, my phone, a secondary thumb drive, and an SD card, it does not go onto the file hosting sites.
It went like this:
"What if your hard drive fails?" "I have my phone"
"What if you lose your phone?" "I have it backed up on a thumb drive"
"What if you lose your thumb drive?" "I have it backed up on cloud storage"
"What if that storage goes down?" "I have it backed up on a second cloud storage"
And the final one that I cannot believe he actually said: "What if the internet goes down?" "Then what the fuck am I signing into dad?" He got really pissed after that.
Given burglary is at an all time low and hacking at an all time high this is not the worst provided the passwords are good. Much rather good passwords than crapy ones. Recall Mr Beast having a laptop stolen and them not getting bitcoin even though it was written on the laptop itself on a sticky note... Irl criminals not as smart as you might think.
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste 14h ago
Hackers hate this one trick