Two computational linguists at the University of Southern California have found that the “Poetry Method” may hold the key for creating computer passwords that are both memorable and difficult to crack, reports USC Village writer Sheyna Gifford.

Developed by Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight from the USC Information Sciences Institute, the Poetry Method begins with a 32,000-word dictionary; each entry is assigned to a unique 15-bit code represented by 0s and 1s. Their computer program develops a random string of sixty 0s and 1s and fits words to it to create a sixteen-syllable password with two end-rhymes.

The password might thus read:

Sophisticated potentates

Misrepresenting Emirates.

Such a password would take more than eleven years to break, making online activities like banking and shopping more secure.

Ghazvininejad and Knight argue that the rhythm and rhyme of the passwords developed through the Poetry Method make them easier to remember than passwords developed through most other methods. (Indeed, we used to memorize whole epics—although can we do that anymore now that many poets write poems that resist memorization?)

“All the [other] efforts people go through to generate random passwords, they fail,” said Knight, a professor in the USC Viterbi computer science department. This “mix of a highly technical topic and a highly humanities product,” on the other hand, succeeds, he says.

The Poetry Method isn’t perfect, though; nearly forty percent of the participants involved in the USC scholars’ study could not recall their passwords, which may be because the poems don’t always make sense.

Ghazvininejad and Knight hope to add psychology to their methods in the future to make passwords “more personal, more emotionally salient, and therefore even more memorable.”

Related reading: New Yorker contributor Brad Leithauser argues in a 2013 essay that memorizing poetry “provides us with knowledge of qualitatively and physiologically different variety.”

Photo Credit: BBC News