Some of you who know me know I have four kids—all boys. Now when you have four brothers growing up together under the same roof there is a lot of competition. In some families this competition would be with sports or academic achievement. In my house the competition is who has the best password.

Of course it’s not too hard to see that I am to blame for this. I spent the good part of a year writing a book on passwords. I spent a number of years developing Pafwert, a unique passphrase generator. I collect passwords every day. I always talk about passwords. And of course, there are those times when every PC in the house is running slow because they are either cracking away at passwords or generating rainbow tables.

And not to mention that when they arrive at that age, they get that father-and-son talk. Not the sex one, the one about never sharing your passwords with others.

So coming up with passwords is a fun thing around here. Maybe not for my wife—who only has long passwords because the domain policy forces it—but for the boys a great password is a matter of pride. The only problem is you can’t ever tell it to anyone. To emphasize that point I even keep the administrator password secret from my boys until they come of age and get the talk at which point they also get to know the secret admin password they have coveted for so many years. It’s a rites of passage thing around our house—kind of an IT Bar Mitzvah.

But the thing is they respect passwords now. When their friends come over and want to use a locked PC, my kids don’t just tell them the password, they have them move aside and enter it for them.

The nice thing about this sibling password rivalry is that there is always this pressure to have a better password. Forget being teased about your first girlfriend, around here you get teased if you haven’t changed your password in the last couple months.

Of course my influence on them won’t last forever. My oldest boy is almost sixteen and will soon want to trade in his RSA SecurID for the type of key you start a car with. And perhaps he’ll start using weak passwords because that’s what all the cool kids do.

But at least I still have my youngest son, who is just over two. He still has at least another 6 months before his first password, but I know that time will come fast. Before I know it I will be sitting down with him, giving the talk: son, don’t ever share your password with others.

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