Are there any guidelines for passwords that need to be read out loud?
I recently saw the movie Olympus Has Fallen.
Like in many action movies, at the end a missile is launched, and the hero (Mike Banning, played by Gerard Butler) has 60 seconds to recall the launch in order to prevent a disaster. (Spoilers!)
So the person from the pentagon is reading the password to Manning over the radio: "Lima, Charlie, Hashtag...". But Banning doesn't have a clue what a hashtag is, so he yells: "What?" And the pentagon perso repeats: "Hashtag?" And time is running out... And then someone else from the pentagon yells: "Shift 3!".
After the movie was over, I thought a lot about that scene. I realize that in real-life there are rarely cases in which a password should be read out loud (most of the time, if it happens, it's because people share passwords, and that's a different problem...).
But here is a case in which the only way to get the password is by saying it over the phone, and it's not a personal password - it's a password only used in an emergency, by whomever has access to the missile launch dashboard.
Now, I know there are various guidelines for passwords: How to make them easy to remember but hard to guess, how to avoid confusing characters, etc. But has anyone come up with rules for over-the-phone-read passwords? I agree, it's a small niche, but at least according to Hollywood – it could be crucial…
To be clear, this is not about "how to read it", but rather "how to choose a password that CAN be read, but is still strong".
UPDATE: Here is the scene, 1:30 minutes on YouTube.
