Master password

You only need to remember one password

Nobody can remember a different strong password for every website, and nobody should have to. Let a password manager remember them all, and protect it with one long passphrase that you make with dice. This page shows you how.

Why reused passwords are the real danger

When a website is hacked, the stolen emails and passwords are traded and tried on other sites: your email, your bank, your shopping accounts. If you used the same password in two places, a break-in at one becomes a break-in at both. This is one of the commonest ways accounts are taken over: nobody "guesses" your password, they simply reuse one that already leaked.

So the goal is simple: a different password for every site. The only practical way to do that is to stop remembering them yourself.

The plan, in three steps

1. Get a password manager. It's a locked vault that creates a long random password for every site and fills it in for you.
2. Make one strong master passphrase to lock the vault. It's the only one you ever need to remember, so it can be really good.
3. Move your accounts in, starting with your email and your bank, letting the manager replace each old password with a new random one.

Choosing a password manager

A good one should be end-to-end encrypted (the company itself can't read your vault), independently audited, and available on every device you use. One we think does this well is Proton Pass, from the Swiss company behind Proton Mail. Proton says it is end-to-end encrypted, open source and independently audited. You don't need to pay for it: Proton's free plan already covers unlimited logins, on as many devices as you like, and it's what most users would be best off with. Bitwarden and 1Password are respected alternatives. Debreach isn't paid to recommend any of them.

1. Install it on your phone and your computer, and create your account.
2. Use an eight-word passphrase as the account password. That is your master password: it unlocks everything else. Make it with dice, below.
3. Turn on two-step verification for the password manager itself, and save the recovery codes it gives you on paper.
4. Add your accounts, most important first: email, bank, then shopping and social media. Each time, let the manager generate a new password and save it.
5. From then on, let it fill in passwords for you. A bonus: it won't fill in a password on a fake website, which protects you from many scam links.

Make your master passphrase with dice

The strongest passwords are random, and people are bad at being random: we pick birthdays, pets and football teams, and swap an "a" for an "@" like everybody else. Dice have no favourites. That is why security experts recommend letting dice choose the words.

You'll use a word list published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights charity. It has 1,296 memorable, everyday words, each numbered with four dice rolls, from 1111 aardvark to 6666 zucchini. Print the word list (PDF) to roll real dice at the table.

1. Roll four dice (or one die four times) and write the numbers down in order, for example 2 4 1 6.
2. Look up that number in the list. 2416 is earlobe. That's your first word.
3. Do it eight times. Eight words, in the order you rolled them, with spaces between: that's your passphrase.
4. Don't swap a word you don't like. The moment you choose, it stops being random. If you truly can't live with the result, roll a whole new passphrase.

Why this list? The EFF, a non-profit digital rights charity, made it in 2016 to improve on the original dice-word method. Four dice give 6×6×6×6 = 1,296 possible rolls, so the list has exactly 1,296 words, each equally likely: every word multiplies the possible passphrases by 1,296, even for someone who knows the list. The words are chosen to be easy to picture, and no two start with the same three letters, so those three letters are always enough to tell which word it is.

Roll the dice here

This rolls on your own device, using your browser's secure random numbers. The passphrase is never sent to us or anyone else. Real dice at the kitchen table are even better.

How many words 6 words7 words8 words (recommended)9 words10 words Roll the dice

Rolled your own dice?

Type the four numbers to find the word

Print the full word list (PDF): EFF Short Wordlist 2, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, used under its Creative Commons Attribution licence.

How many words do you need?

Strength is measured in entropy: a count of how many guesses it would take to be sure of finding your password, written in "bits". Every extra bit doubles the guesses. Because each word is one of 1,296 equally likely choices, each word adds about 10.3 bits, and each extra word makes the passphrase 1,296 times harder to guess.

*Our own arithmetic, assuming a very well-funded attacker who has stolen a copy of the locked vault and can try a trillion guesses every second. Good password managers deliberately make each guess slow, so real attacks take far longer than this.

• Eight words for your master passphrase. That's what we recommend. It's a little stronger than the EFF's recommended minimum (six words from its longer list), and works with the grid code below.
• Nine if you want a margin for decades to come.
• Three or four random words is fine for an ordinary website login, where the site blocks repeated wrong guesses. The National Cyber Security Centre's "three random words" advice is aimed at those. But a password manager will make those for you anyway.

The strength comes from the dice and the number of words, not from secrecy about the method. Even an attacker who knows you used this exact list and this exact page still faces every one of those guesses.

A discreet written copy: the grid code

You should keep a copy of your master passphrase somewhere safe. If you'd rather that copy didn't look like a passphrase, the grid code turns each word into two characters. Eight words become 16 characters: short enough to engrave, or to write somewhere nobody would think twice about.

1. Writing it down. Each word comes from four dice, for example 2 4 1 6 (earlobe). Split them into two pairs: 24 and 16. Row 2, column 4 is J. Row 1, column 6 is F. So that word becomes JF.
2. Reading it back. Find J on the grid (row 2, column 4) and F (row 1, column 6) to get 2416, then look that up on the word list.
3. Nothing to keep but the code. The grid is just the alphabet followed by 0 to 9, so you can redraw it any time.

This is a disguise, not a lock. To anyone else the code looks like random letters and numbers, but someone who knows this method could turn it back into your passphrase. Treat the code as carefully as the passphrase itself, and keep two-step verification switched on.

Turn words into the code

Your words (the first three letters of each is enough) Show the code

Turn the code back into words

The characters Show the words

Both run on your own device; nothing is sent to us. The check character is an optional 17th character. Add it to the end of your code and, when you read it back, it tells you if a character was misread. Engraved or handwritten, O and 0, I and 1, S and 5, B and 8, and Z and 2 are easy to mix up, so write zero with a stroke through it.

Keeping your one password safe

• Write it on paper and keep it somewhere safe at home, like you would a passport. Paper can't be hacked, and it means a forgotten passphrase isn't a disaster.
• Never use it anywhere else. It is for the password manager only.
• Never type it after following a link in an email or text. Open the app yourself.
• Tell someone you trust where the paper is, so your family isn't locked out if something happens to you.
• Helping a parent? Sit down together, roll the dice with them, and write the passphrase in their own handwriting. It's ten minutes well spent.

Isn't one password a single point of failure?

It's a fair worry. Yes: your master passphrase matters more than any password you've had before. That is exactly why it is eight random words and protected by two-step verification. Compare that with what most people have today: a handful of memorable passwords reused across dozens of sites, where one leak opens many doors. One excellent lock on one vault is far safer than fifty weak locks with the same key.

Want to know if your passwords have already leaked? That's what the breach check is for, after sign-up. Join the waiting list.