Anyone who has a significant exposure to computers in their lives, which includes almost everyone, has encountered the Catch 22 of passwords. This dilemma works in several ways that we are all aware of.

The first problem comes when you are forced to have multiple usernames and/or passwords for different systems or programs. You may have one password that you use for your email account, another one for online banking, and others to log in to other online accounts that you may have. To add to the confusion, many people have jobs where they are given a username and password to log in to their work network and then separate login information for different programs that they need to use once logged in to that network.

Simply having all these different names can make it confusing enough to remember usernames and passwords. The problem is further magnified by password requirements that require complex and supposedly unbreakable passwords. With requirements that make users have a minimum number of characters, upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols the security of the system is greatly increased, but it is also harder for users to remember passwords.

One thing that many people to do help simplify this situation is to use the same username whenever they can and the same password almost everywhere or at least as much as possible. The problem with this is that they are making their login information more vulnerable by doing this. When you use the same username and password for several different accounts, if one of them is compromised they are all at risk.

To be safe, a person should have a unique username and password for every account that they have. This causes even more problems because then you end up with large numbers of usernames and passwords to not only remember, but remember which information is for which account.

Two ways to overcome this that many people use are either writing down the information in a notebook or on a file on their computer or to use a login management program that will automatically log them in to whatever account they are trying to access.

The problems with these methods are that when a password is written down, it automatically loses an amount of security, if this is electronic the problem is even worse because it’s easier for someone to get in to your computer and access that file than to get in to the bottom drawer of your desk and look at that hidden notebook. Using password management software can seem useful, but is not much different from having the information saved on a file on your computer.

Is there a good solution to this situation? I’m not sure there is, so far I have been able to simply remember most of my login information for different accounts and only write down a few of them. The ones I do write down, I try to write in as much of a shorthand version that only I would understand as possible. What are some solutions that you use?