What is a good phonetic alphabet for a password application?

Question

I'm writing an application that will create "difficult" passwords for the user. The user will only see the password once, and they'll copy it into a client that will remember it for them forever.

Works great on a full-fledged PC, where I can select the whole password while it's on display in the browser, then paste it into the client that will be using it.

Works less great when I generate the password on my PC, then need to manually transpose it onto my mobile device. So for this case, I would like to display the password in some spelled-out unambiguous way to help the user hold it in their minds during the copy.

For example: At6Pq = Alpha tango six Papa quebec

What is a good phonetic alphabet that I can translate the letter components into? Ideally I'd like something that is going to make sense both to English speakers (a slight majority of users) and English-as-a-second-language users?

Passwords generated will be in the form [a-zA-Z0-9]{20}

I'm currently considering the NATO alphabet, but some of the entries like "papa" and "india" just don't ring right for me for some reason.

Answer 1

I'd go with the international standard, and that's the 'NATO alphabet' you refer to. I don't think it is limited to 'NATO'; it is used by airlines, for example. The names are chosen carefully to be distinguishable over noisy circuits.

Answer 2

Did you see this Wikipedia page that gives an overview of the sommon of the common spelling alphabets used by various organisations/countries? The British Forces/NY Police ones look quite straightforward (all very common words, so probably familiar to most non-native speakers too) - so you may want to go with one of those. In general, I wouldn't worry too much about how they sound - any common spelling alphabet will do. If you want to create one of your own (or a hybrid of existing ones), it probably shouldn't be much of an issue, though I don't see any particular reason for not choosing one of those listed on that page.

Hope that helps.