Confidentiality and security

Your Sciences Po account gives you access to the Sciences Po information system. It is essential to protect it.

Each account holder is responsible for setting up and managing their own password.

What makes a good password?

A strong password should be:

• as long as possible
• difficult to guess
• known only to the person who uses it
• unique for each account
• changed regularly and whenever there is a risk.

These precautions protect your accounts. It is essential to follow them. Using passwords that are too simple or reusing the same password across multiple sites increases the risk of compromising your accounts.

For example, in the event of a hack resulting in a data breach on an e-commerce site, your login credentials will be exposed and could therefore be used to access other sites in your name.

How to create a strong password

You can draw on titles of books or films, places that have marked important periods of your life, or foreign languages. Here are several examples:

• Film title + year of grandmother’s birth: Gone With the Wind = Gwtw1901
• Battle + famous line of dialogue: Battle of Trafalgar + "May the force be with you" = 1805MTFbwy
• Mnemonic phrase in another language + insertion of digits: Calma como a Madeira = 4C3c2a1M

Where should you store your passwords?

Whether in your personal life, professional life, or academic life at Sciences Po, passwords are personal and confidential. They should never be written down in plain text or saved in web browsers.

You should never share your Sciences Po account password with any third-party tool. You must memorize it.

Learn more about managing your Sciences Po account.

Please note: Do not use the same password to access other digital services, whether they are internal to Sciences Po or external.