You should be safe as long as your master password isn’t small, less than 15 characters. The longer the password, the better. Personally what I do is use a pass phrase to make it easily memorable, and then use it as a base to inflate security somewhat artificially.
Wrap the pass phrase around in brackets or symbols; mix lower/upper case; replace (or add to) a word in your pass phrase with one from a random other language, so instead of hello you type bonjour. Bonus points if you are able to replace even a few letters in your pass phrase with fancy diacritics, or fuck it add an emoji or two.
Then again there are a LOT of other factors which go into security. Theoretically the lyrics of song are decent as a pass phrase but there’s not much point if everyone knows what your favourite song is, or if you are learning Spanish then you’ll replace the English words with Spanish.
Unless you’re in a position where you’re targeted by nations or are working extremely high profile jobs like CEO or digital security you should be safe really with all these but as I said there’s a lot to keep in mind.
2FA is in the name, 2 factor authentication. A “factor” can be considered as proof that you are who you are. The more the factors provided, the more concrete proof the system has that the user is legitimate.
What a factor is is a more complicated. It can be broadly put in 3 categories (there’s more but we’ll ignore for now) :
something you know, like a PIN/password
something you are, like biometrics/eye scanning
something you have, like an ATM card or phone
The 2FA you are thinking of is probably the 1st (a password you know) + a PIN sent to or generated by something you have (a phone). If the 2nd pin was some you had created by memory like a password rather than a remote system generated one then it would be considered same as the first factor, it wouldn’t be multi factor.
So yeah it’s important that you keep both factors as secure as possible. A good password + a phone to generate TOTPs. I mean theoretically you can keep a password of ABC and keep 2FA on so hackers wouldn’t be able to get into your system but let’s follow best practices yeah? Use a password generator to make complex passwords for a login and enable 2FA.
You should be safe as long as your master password isn’t small, less than 15 characters. The longer the password, the better. Personally what I do is use a pass phrase to make it easily memorable, and then use it as a base to inflate security somewhat artificially.
Wrap the pass phrase around in brackets or symbols; mix lower/upper case; replace (or add to) a word in your pass phrase with one from a random other language, so instead of hello you type bonjour. Bonus points if you are able to replace even a few letters in your pass phrase with fancy diacritics, or fuck it add an emoji or two.
Then again there are a LOT of other factors which go into security. Theoretically the lyrics of song are decent as a pass phrase but there’s not much point if everyone knows what your favourite song is, or if you are learning Spanish then you’ll replace the English words with Spanish.
Unless you’re in a position where you’re targeted by nations or are working extremely high profile jobs like CEO or digital security you should be safe really with all these but as I said there’s a lot to keep in mind.
How does this all compare to using 2fa everywhere?
2FA is in the name, 2 factor authentication. A “factor” can be considered as proof that you are who you are. The more the factors provided, the more concrete proof the system has that the user is legitimate.
What a factor is is a more complicated. It can be broadly put in 3 categories (there’s more but we’ll ignore for now) :
The 2FA you are thinking of is probably the 1st (a password you know) + a PIN sent to or generated by something you have (a phone). If the 2nd pin was some you had created by memory like a password rather than a remote system generated one then it would be considered same as the first factor, it wouldn’t be multi factor.
So yeah it’s important that you keep both factors as secure as possible. A good password + a phone to generate TOTPs. I mean theoretically you can keep a password of ABC and keep 2FA on so hackers wouldn’t be able to get into your system but let’s follow best practices yeah? Use a password generator to make complex passwords for a login and enable 2FA.