Show HN: I gamified passwords to make them easier to remember

1 points by benthayer 11 hours ago

I recently got locked out of an account that I deliberately set up to be airgapped from my password manager and that got me thinking how to make passwords less forgettable. After several iterations that led me to the concept of using a sequence of deterministically generated word grids where the grid depends on the previous words of your password and the next word of your password is one of the words in the grid. Instead of forgetting you can just vibe your way through the grids and recover your password like that. The passwords are longer to account for the entropy reduction from using the grid but I find it to still be a lot more memorable and pretty impossible to forget.

It basically just hashes the password and takes a mod of it to get the indexes in the word list for the next grid. You could easily make your own and integrate it with an existing system in like a day or two to replace passwords. You could also use the hashes as seeds to generate AI images if you wanted to iterate further and make it really distinctive. Could be interesting to see if users actually like it / want to use it. Probably makes more sense for airgapped/high security use cases like mine though. What I built is just a proof of concept that I might use personally but I’d love for you to try it out and see what you think. Obviously you shouldn’t actually use it for your passwords since I could hypothetically be logging your data or take it down/change the algorithm but maybe it’s fun or cool or inspires you to build something similar