Safari Technology Preview 220 Release Notes (developer.apple.com)

I just signed up a few minutes ago and, full disclosure. I'm not a hacker. Not even close. But I had what I think is a pretty clever idea and wanted to know what the experts thought. This will probably be my first and last post. I hope you like it.

I’ve always been told by security "experts" to never keep my password(s) on my computer. But what about this scenario?

I’m keeping an unencrypted .txt file on an unencrypted hard drive on a PC with no password, no firewall, and a router that’s still set to admin/admin.

The file (which is the only thing on my desktop) is called: “THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS MY MASTER PASSWORD FOR MY PASSWORD MANAGER. PLEASE DON’T DO ANYTHING BAD, OKAY?”

Inside is a single string of characters. Could be 5,000, could be 1,000,000 depending on how secure I want to feel. Somewhere in that big mess is my actual password, an uninterrupted substring between 8 and 30 characters long.

To find it, I just Ctrl+F for a small string of digits I remember. It might be 4 to 8 characters long and is somewhere near my real password (before, after, beginning, end, whatever I choose). I know where to start and where to stop.

For example, pretend this is part of the full string: 4z4LGb3TVdkSWNQoL9!l&TZHHUBO6DFCU6!czZy0v@2G3R2Vs2JOX&ow)

My password is: WNQoL9!l&TZHHUBO6DFCU6!*czZy0v

I know to search for WNQo and stop when I hit @.

So, what do you think?

Is it safe to store my password like this on my PC?

Comments (4)

Agraillo · 17h ago

I think you invented (or reinvented) a simplified password manager, or a plain-text password manager. A usual PM solves the task of managing by human memory unmanageable: plenty of passwords with variable complexities routing them all to a single one intended for the human. In your system you have your own version of the master password (prefix + suffix) that locks out your actual password (a single substring). There are obvious drawbacks compared to a general PM like a much lower space of possible variants or needing to manage this manually (like generating the file or choosing randomly your prefix and suffix). But there is at least one benefit, if you keep the system simple enough (while not making it simple in generating the sequences), no hidden vulnerability should waiting to happen

rzzzwilson · 22h ago

Only one password? The experts (I'm not one of them) tell you to have a different password for each account, online and offline. The point is you don't want one leaked password to compromise any other account. I have something like 200 online accounts and they all have different passwords.

JSR_FDED · 21h ago

He is referring to his master password for his password manager.

beardyw · 21h ago

In some ways worse, since the password manager is unlikely to lock after multiple tries. They typically use lots of cycles to encrypt and decrypt to slow down multiple attempts. Given a minimum and maximum password length you can calculate how many tries to be sure to get it, and half that is the average.

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Comments (4)