[Cryptography] Of writing down passwords

[Bill Stewart]

At 04:54 AM 9/21/2014, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>Or write it down...  Umm, OK, and this is Australia's national carrier?
>Come to think of it, perhaps "write it down" was correct after all, in a
>financial sort of way.

Unless your threat model for ADSL modems includes people coming
inside your house, connecting a PC, and messing around,
a yellow sticky note attached to the box is plenty secure.
(Most such devices only allow administration from the ethernet side,
not the wireless side, and probably the telco has their own for the DSL.)

It lets you use an adequately strong password for a device
that you're almost never going to actually log in to,
so you're not going to remember it reliably,
and if you do need to upgrade the software, you'll have the password.
If the box has a serial number printed on the outside,
that's potentially a good password, unless it's the MAC address
where there are sometimes threats.