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(For ordinary people in easy-to-understand language)

By Josephine Rosenburgh

I've just published my first ebook, one about a system for creating your own passwords
effortlessly (and extremely securely). With great gusto Cyber Defense have invited me to write
an article for them so here it is.

To start off if you have problems with basic maths then this is not for you. Can you comfortably
do basic maths without using a calculator? If you can then proceed.

There are many people who use mathematics in their trade: scientists, mathematicians,
engineers, cryptographers, accountants, computer programmers and maths teachers, amongst
others. In addition there are people involved with games involving computations of large
numbers of permutations, like chess and sudoku. However, none of them have ever undertaken
the task of creating a system which effortlessly allows ordinary people to create many secure
passwords, on a single sheet of paper.

Normally, encryption is performed by a machine/computer because it involves so many
computations. You can't expect a human being to perform all that and do so accurately and
quickly. This should be impossible. It is a huge task.
But what's the problem with all of those people just mentioned? Surely all those clever people
should be able to create such a system?

The answer is that they can't.

What is the problem? The clear answer is that they don't know what the problem is.

Why?

Those people only deal with tasks that are known. So chess and sudoku players know what is in
front of them. Cryptographers know that they have to create a system which scrambles the
message/data and which unscrambles it later to reproduce the same message/data.

However, the real problem is that none of those people actually know what passwords are. They
just think they know. People think that passwords are a selection of characters out of a finite
selection of characters. Let us say that 80 different characters are available on your keyboard
and you're trying to create a 20-character password. You have 80^20 (80 to the power of 20)
combinations to choose from. That's a finite selection. However, a system which lets you create
many different passwords is a system which is derived from an infinite number of systems and
that's where the problem lies and that's more like the true definition of passwords. Those 20
characters were not a password but a selection.

Let us go back a little in history. Some time ago the Englishman Christopher Monckton created
a mathematical jigsaw puzzle called "Eternity" (TM). It contained 209 different flat shapes which
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