{"id":1365,"date":"2017-01-06T14:39:19","date_gmt":"2017-01-06T18:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/?p=1365"},"modified":"2025-08-09T14:02:42","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T18:02:42","slug":"jesus-is-not-your-password","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2017\/01\/jesus-is-not-your-password\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesus is not your password"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Christianity Today<\/cite> I have a piece today about bad passwords that Christians use: Beware of Making Jesus Your Password<\/a>. I’m pretty excited that they kept the line about soccer.<\/p>\n

Here I want to share the data behind the piece. The 32 million passwords come from the 2009 RockYou breach, available here<\/a>. I used rockyou-withcount.txt.tar.gz<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The main list of passwords comes from (1) taking this list, (2) removing non-alphanumeric and leading and trailing numbers, (3) lower-casing the result, and (4) combining the totals. In the raw list, “jesus” is the 103rd most-common password; by normalizing it with these steps, it jumps to #30. The purpose here is to find the core part of the password. It’s good from a security perspective that people add leading and trailing (mostly trailing) numbers to their passwords, but they’re not so relevant here.<\/p>\n

The list of “Christian” passwords is based on a different breach<\/a> of a faith-based website. I pulled a bunch of patterns from passwords that were popular there.<\/p>\n

Here’s the data behind the piece:<\/p>\n

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  1. normalized-passwords.zip<\/a>. A list of 238,000 passwords following the normalization scheme I describe above. Every normalized password from RockYou that appeared at least ten times is here. Note that there’s extensive swearing.<\/li>\n
  2. christian-passwords.txt<\/a>. All 505 Christian-themed passwords.<\/li>\n
  3. verse-passwords.txt<\/a>. All 295 plausible verse references. Not all of them are actually references: for example, “daniel14” could refer to Daniel 1:4<\/a> (or even Daniel 14<\/a>), but it’s most likely just someone’s name with the number “14” after it. So I don’t include it in the top-25 list that appears at CT.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These are my favorite tweets about it:<\/p>\n

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    @nicole_cliffe<\/a> i am fishing for men while they are phishing for men.<\/p>\n

    \u2014 Ben Sharbaugh (@bsharbaugh) January 6, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \n

    @bsharbaugh<\/a> @Nicole_Cliffe<\/a> Phishers of men is a pretty sweet name for a hacker group.<\/p>\n

    \u2014 Tim Sullivan (@t_t_t_timmy) January 6, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    Jesus welcomes all, which is not great for computer privacy:https:\/\/t.co\/kKCiuLIbrB<\/a><\/p>\n

    (HT: @Nicole_Cliffe<\/a>) pic.twitter.com\/tvrRmpB52g<\/a><\/p>\n

    \u2014 John Scalzi (@scalzi) January 6, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n