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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I’m not the person you’re replying to but I have a fun answer for how I did it before I moved to password managers.

    I used to have just a single password, normal-ish password. Reasonable length, some numbers in there, random caps. But in order for me to have unique passwords on every site without losing track of all the passwords, I added the first and last letter of the name of the service at a specific point inside the password. My password was cryptic enough that if you would see it you wouldn’t immediately notice it. But for me it meant I had a single strong password that was easy to remember and unique for every service.

    I’m still kind of proud of that one, even though I don’t use that method anymore.


  • So basically a fancy hashing algorithm to get the same password for the same information you give it. Neat idea but I am not convinced yet.

    If your Spectre secret gets somehow leaked (and your full name could easily be found), that’s immediately all your current and future passwords leaked. Now, this would in theory also be a problem with regular password managers that live in the cloud. Though smart ones hopefully add 2FA or similar before they let their users log in. For offline password managers the hacker would need your secret + database to get your password. That’s a lot harder. Spectre takes one of those items away, because the ‘database’ is their algorithm which literally runs on their webpage. All they need is a single password.

    What if a site you use leaks your password and you have to change your password for that site only? Spectre won’t help you with that, as it will still give you the (burned) password. So you manually have to remember which sites use Spectre for passwords and which ones don’t.

    Have any services that have been provided to you with a set password you can’t change (eg: some service your job uses), Spectre won’t help you with this as it won’t hold any custom passwords. Have any weird services that requires a specific length and/or forbidden characters Spectre does? Good luck, Spectre can’t help you here either. It’s not a password manager.