Passwords, passphrases and passkeys

Purpose

Unique user names and secure passwords and passphrases are used by systems to distinguish between authorized users and unauthorized individuals. Weak passwords can be cracked by a threat actor within a matter of seconds or minutes, merely delaying their access to your systems and data, rather than preventing it.


Audience

faculty researchers Admin staff IT staff students


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Initial considerations

Do NOT share your password with anyone, regardless of their stated intent. Your supervisor, manager, colleague, nor IT staff should ask you to provide it.

Follow the University’s safe password practices when protecting institutional accounts and systems.


What can I do?

New account, new password (or passphrase).

  • For every account you have, you should use a unique password or passphrase to help limit the exposure caused by a breach or theft to just one account.

Use passphrases.

Long

  • Create a passphrase made up of 5 or more words.

Random

  • Avoid common phrases or words which are closely correlated with each other. A limited dictionary size reduces the possible complexity of a passphrase.

Use complex passwords, when passphrases are not possible.

Long

  • Create a password with 14 or more characters, where allowed.

  • Brute-force attacks, wherein all character combinations are attempted in order to guess a password, are most successful for short passwords.

    • Whereas a password made up of 8 characters could take only hours to crack, passwords over 14 characters would take centuries.

Random

  • Avoid common phrases, words associated with your identity (e.g.; name, username, job, family members, hobbies, interest) and other easily guessable words or strings of characters.

Complex

  • Use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.

Enroll in the University’s multi-factor authentication (MFA), if you haven’t done so already.

Use a password manager to help prevent password reuse.

  • When passwords are reused across multiple accounts, a single data breach or successful phishing attempt could result in malicious individuals gaining access to the various accounts where that password was used.

Where possible, use passkeys over passwords.

Be aware of known phishing attempts and report suspicious emails to help protect your and others credentials.


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Additional help

General

Contact us | Information Security (IS)

Contact us | Information Technology (IT)

Researchers

Research Information Security - Information Security at University of Toronto


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