We encourages the use of “passphrases” instead of passwords. The reason is that authentication-attacking systems can figure out a password in less than one day if you use the most common password combinations, which include names of your children, team names, dictionary words, letters, numbers, and symbols.

Note: It is often NOT the student data that these authentication attacking systems are trying to obtain. In fact, they are often seeking student names in order to guess the parent's password for financial institutions, credit cards, and so on.

Authentication-attacking systems can even figure out common characters that are used to replace values within passwords, which defeats the purpose of this extra level of encryption.

Examples of Common Character Replacements (not all-inclusive)

Common character . . .	Used to replace . . .
@	A, a
0	O, o
1	L, l
3	E, e
5	S, s
!	l

 

The password “J0rdan17” can be decrypted in less than one day by modern attack solutions. However, a passphrase like “MySonsNameIsJ0rdan17” takes up to 500 years to automate an attack. The longer the passphrase, the more secure it is.

Passphrase Examples

Instead of this password . . .	Use this passphrase . . .
Packers1991	IloveTheGreenBayPackers1991!
Tiger	MySchoolMascotIsTheTigers
Cubs@1234	My#1TeamIsTheCubs
James1	MyNameIsJames

Important: When assigning passwords to an entire class or organization, do not use the same password for all users. Doing so will compromise your users' data security. For example, if you provide a password of "P@ssword1" for one user, that user could use that information to get into other users' accounts by guessing other account's usernames.

While passphrases use more characters than traditional passwords, they can be easily remembered, given that they are sentences or phrases. Most importantly, the use of passphrases protects all of our users' identities and teaches users of all skill levels and ages that protecting one's digital identity is just as important as learning to read and write.