Password best practices for users

Use the following best practices to create strong passwords for your users that protect your deployment.

Tips for creating strong passwords

• Create unique passwords with a combination of words, numbers, symbols, and both lowercase and capitalized letters.
• Consider groups of words that form a phrase or sentence, such as the opening sentence of your favorite novel or the opening line to a good joke. The ideal password could be an obscure, random phrase that is easy for you to remember, but impossible for an automated system to guess.
• Make your password as long as your system lets you. It is increasingly easy to build password-cracking tools that can try hundreds of billions of possible password combinations per second. Each character you add to a password or passphrase increases resistance to brute-force methods.

Avoid the following insecure practices

• Do not choose passwords based on personal information, such as your birth date, your Social Security or phone number, or the names of family members.
• Do not use a word from the dictionary. Password-cracking tools that are freely available online often come with dictionary lists that will try thousands of common names and passwords. Try using multiple words, adding a numeral to the words, or adding punctuation at the beginning or end of the word, or both.
• Never use the same password for different websites.
• Never use the password you've picked for your email account at any online website.
• Do not store your list of passwords on your computer in plain text, or even on a piece of paper.