How to choose a good password

A password should be 10 characters or longer. A practical approach for choosing a new passwords is to

 ssh login.coli.uni-saarland.de
 apg -a0 -MNLC -t -m10 -x10

Passwords generated this way will take on average approximately 64 years to be broken by a 8xTitan-X GPU cluster node.

Linux / MacOS

To change your password please log in with SecureShell (ssh) to 'login.coli.uni-saarland.de' and enter the command "passwd".

 ssh login.coli.uni-saarland.de
 passwd

Windows

Press CTRL-Alt-Del and select "Change Password". Windows passwords are independent from Linux / MacOS / Mail passwords.

Email / Web Server

Your email password is the same as your Linux / MacOS password.

More information on passwords

A password should be

• kept secret
• changed on a regular basis
• not be easy to guess by others (like your Matrikelnummer or 'klausi1' for instance)

A very good way to create hard to guess, yet easy to remember passwords (or passphrases) is to employ the "diceware" method using real world, physical dice. In short

• roll a dice 5 times,
• look up the word which corresponds to the result using an existing list of words,
• repeat until you have 6 words.
• Your 30 dice rolls yielded ~77 bits of entropy which is now encoded in the 6 words you chose.

A more detailled description including word lists for many languages can be found here:

http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html