Before getting into this, I'm going to give you people some context first: a long time ago, one of my friends on the fediverse, @allinone0, made a post jokingly depicting ridiculous password requirements for a fictional website. As a joke, I responded to that post with "HOW ARE YOU GONNA FIT ALL OF THAT INTO 12 CHARACTERS," to which she responded with "you are a smart person, I'm sure you can figure it out". Someone put their trust in me, I was not going to lose it, I was going to design that impossible password, no matter what.
So, I did it. I made sure to put my process of making it in a blog post, and it was a huge success! It didn't go viral, sure, but the people who did see it loved it. And to be honest, so did I. Ivan's Secure Password became an inside joke, and I was really quite proud.
So why am I posting about that now? Well, looking back, I'm not very happy about how I wrote it. So, I am remastering it! Let's get started:
Allinone's password required:
, and %ü or すEven though you may think we can have more than 12 characters, this is wrong. In the list, we can see that the password requires 12 characters, it doesn't say we can have more, or else it would have said "more than 12 characters". So it will be the limit for now.
In order to make such password, you cannot be straight. The word "straight" takes up 8 out of 12 characters. So instead, we will find an alternative. The shortest word defining a sexuality that I know of is "gay," so we can use that for this experiment. The password so far is GAY
We can reuse the sexuality to save up some characters, we can go from GAY to 647. With these three numbers, we already met two of the requirements. Three numbers and sexuality, since "GAY" is still readable.
"But Ivan, 12 is the limit, this is already impossible!" is probably what you are thinking. Well, my friend, I have surprisingly found a solution for this. In this part, she said 12 symbols, not 12 characters. This means that we can just use obscure Unicode characters that have various symbols in them. And so, meet Unicode Character 4DC1 ䷁, also known as HEXAGRAM FOR THE RECEPTIVE EARTH.
This single character contains 12 lines (valid symbols) in total, and only takes up ONE character! Now our password is 647䷁, already meets 3 requirements and is only 4 characters long.
Again I will do some Unicode magic, meet ﷽. It is a single character that carries a whole sentence, it being "BISMILLAH AR-RAHMAN AR-RAHEEM". Putting its possible meanings aside, and focusing instead on its linguistic properties, it's the perfect candidate! By Unicode terms it's one single character, but in linguistic terms it's a whole sentence that, indeed has, more than 12 characters. Confusing I know, but hey it works! Our password is now 647䷁﷽
This one is a hard one, they are impossible to put inside a password, or are they? - Actually, we can compress them. First, we'll take the shortest Mastodon emoji, 🅱 the emoji code of 🅱 is :b:. We can use this to our advantage. First off, we don't actually need to type 45 letters, we just need to somehow signify their quantity. So let's just do :b:45! But we would be losing 5 whole characters right there. We can't afford to lose such amount of characters!
So I will be very cheap. The colon only exists to indicate when the emoji starts and ends, we don't need it here! We can just cut it away and as the result we get b45. It's still 3 wasted characters but better than 45! Now the password is 647䷁b45﷽
Wait guys... Have you seen that? There is an optimization we can make now. We can just remove all made changes and place the b to the left, next to 647. Making it b647䷁﷽. Why? You may ask, well, it's really simple. We reuse the numbered sexuality to add 647 b's. We surpassed the requirement, which is amazing! Furthermore, we're almost halfway through (5 out of 13 requirements) and only have 6 characters yet :)
We can just put all of these in one very easily, we just need to make something that points at the user's brain where this information is stored! That's why I'll be using the Unicode eye 👁, this eye will read the mind of the user for this information. Now the password is b647䷁﷽👁
This requirement is not part of the password, but the user's. But we can still add it in the password to make sure that the user remembers to grab them. We will put a bomb 💣 right next to the b in order to emphasize "647 bombs" to the user, we only need 5 but 647 also work! 💣b647䷁﷽👁
Again, we can use the same trick that we used with the bomb, as long as we don't put an element that's more than two characters behind 647 it's valid. Sadly, I don't think liquid sugar in itself exists (since they are asking for liters, not grams) but we can use a natural alternative: honey! 🍯. 🍯💣b647䷁﷽👁
In order to tell the user the movie script is inside this password, we can make use of two emojis: 🐝 and 📜. We carefully add the two emojis into the password, and we get this 🍯💣b647䷁﷽👁🐝📜
Last but not least, we got this. This again is dependent on the user, but we can put a reference to the mythical phrase "I use Arch BTW". First off, the most important word is BTW. BTW means By The Way, but it can also mean... BeTWeen! Casually enough, there's a Unicode character called Between (≬). We will also add it! 🍯💣b647䷁﷽👁🐝📜≬
Allinone's decent password is 🍯💣b647䷁﷽👁🐝📜≬. It contains exactly 12 characters and meets all of her requirements. It's so "powerful" that it completely broke my Vim and I had to switch to another editor mid-writing this article. ;)
There is no lesson here, nobody learned anything, and it was very time-consuming to design this password, but it was fun! I hope Allinone and other fediverse friends will think of more challenges like this (even though this was supposed to be a joke), I'd be gladly doing them all! All of 'em! :D
That was it for today, stay hydrated!