The Royal Armoury · Notice the Second
VERDICTS: Upon the Passwords of the Realm
The court kept a password strength meter until the spring, when it awarded five green bars to "Dragon2019!". The meter was dismissed. A horse holds the office now, and the office has never been held better.
A free password security poster from the crown: six passwords, submitted to the paddock and ruled upon without explanation. Print it for the office, the classroom, the corridor by the kettle; anywhere the passwords are chosen badly and defended loudly.
Take up arms
Printable at A4 and US Letter, free. Built for a password awareness campaign, a staff induction or a classroom wall, where one sheet has to do the work of a policy nobody reads.
| Issue | Image | Slides | |
|---|---|---|---|
A4, full colour
|
PDF 627 KB | PNG 5.4 MB | — |
US Letter, full colour
|
PDF 601 KB | PNG 5.1 MB | — |
A4, black and white
|
PDF 726 KB | PNG 848 KB | — |
US Letter, black and white
|
PDF 692 KB | PNG 734 KB | — |
|
Web and newsletter
|
— | JPG 436 KB | — |
Presentation slide
|
— | PNG 1.9 MB | PPTX 1.9 MB |
Print from the PDF. Its parchment is lighter than the one on this page, because a screen is lit from behind and a sheet of paper is not: the darker ground comes out muddy on a colour printer and eats a cartridge doing it. The PNG is the screen edition. The black and white issue asks the least of any printer and is unchanged.
The black and white issue is for the printer down the corridor, the one with only the black cartridge left in it. Same horse, same verdicts, no gilding.
The PowerPoint slide arrives with speaker notes from the court: what each verdict means in plain terms, what to say when someone asks what to do first, and what to tell a subject who confesses to using one password everywhere. Drop it into any awareness deck; the King asks only his name on the door.
The record, for the record
- Summer2026! Staple says nothing. It satisfies the policy and nothing else; a capital, a number and a punctuation mark is the pattern every guessing tool tries first.
- P@ssw0rd. Staple stares until you leave. Swapping letters for symbols fools nobody: the substituted spellings are already in the lists.
- Dragon2019!, then Dragon2020! Staple says nothing. He can count. Adding one to the end is not a new password, whatever the calendar says.
- The same good password on every account. One breach opens all your accounts. When any one site is breached, that pair gets tried at every other door you own.
- Four random words. Staple neighs with approval. Length beats cleverness, and a human can actually remember it.
- Sixteen random characters from a password manager. Staple neighs twice, an honour otherwise reserved for hay. It is the only answer that scales: long, different everywhere, and remembered for you.
To earn the horse's approval: make it longer, use a different one everywhere, and add a second step to log in. Start with your email, the account that resets all the others, and work down from there.
One more thing the manager now does, which it could not when this poster was drawn: it can hold your passkeys as well as your passwords. A passkey has nothing to type and nothing to steal, and the manager you already keep is a perfectly good place to put one.
The full proceedings are on record: the Royal Horse Judges Passwords, including the Chancellor's appeal on grounds of seniority and what the horse did about it.
Putting an October campaign together? This poster and everything else worth using is gathered on the Cybersecurity Awareness Month page.
The terms of issue
Free to use unaltered: at work, in a classroom, in a newsletter, on any noticeboard that will have them. Not for resale. The credit is already printed on the thing, so there is nothing for you to add.
That is the whole treaty. The crown's lawyers are disappointed by its brevity and have been informed that the matter is closed.
Requests, questions and corrections reach the court at [email protected].
More notices are being forged. The kingdom has, regrettably, no shortage of suspects.