Context
If you’re anything like me, you’ve created your fair share of user names and passwords over the years and it is likely that many more will be added in the future as well. To complicate things even more, you are probably using multiple different user names and passwords because of different requirements. Possible reasons:
- Username (because your desired username might not meet the requirements or might already be in use. Or because your -email is used as your username)
- Minimum number of characters.
- Maximum number of characters.
- (Specific) special characters required.
- (Specific) special characters not allowed.
- x number of upper case characters
- x number of lower case characters
- x number of digits.
- x number of special characters.
- Password needs to be changed every x days.
Because of the large number of accounts (I have about 200-300 accounts) it is impossible to remember them all. Even though it might be tempting to use (a couple of) the same username and password combinations for logging on, this is not recommended because it is a security risk. When one of the places where you use a specific user/password combination is compromised, all other places where you use this same combination are at risk too. In this post I will try to describe some challenges and what you can do about it.

