Username and password management on a smart TV

So often I find myself having to spell out complex usernames and passwords using that obnoxious up down left right grid on a smart TV – an unbelievably tedious task. And the world of cyber security only continues to make it more difficult with longer and more complex passwords being demanded. And yet I can find no password management solution in the smart TV environment. Any help would be much appreciated.

PS A Bluetooth keyboard and mouse can alleviate some of the pain, but not all of it by any stretch. Voice dictation can help minimally, although many of the grids have voice dictation disabled for that specific page – as if the objective is to tighten the screws and make it as painful as possible

@Kenny

  1. About how many accounts, that you want to use on the smart TV, are we speaking? (e.g. two or two-hundred?!?)
  2. Which accounts do you want to use that way? → Maybe they have a procedure for using it like this?
  3. Especially if it are only a few accounts, you could set up passphrases instead of passwords. Passphrases are easier to remember and easier to type. (e.g. a four-random-words passphrase)
  4. I think some accounts offer to use a QR code, that then the smart TV can show and you can “scan” with the smartphone. E.g. Google/YouTube does it like, I think… Maybe some accounts with passkeys could also do it like this?! (–> CDA = cross-device authentication)

For character input grids operated by a TV remote control, typing a word is not necessarily easier than typing a non-word. My suggestion would be to use a random character string, containing only characters that can be accessed without switching the keyboard layout. For example, use all-lowercase letters, and make the password a 14-letter random string. This password will have 66 bits of entropy, which (if MD5-hashed) would take 1.5 years to crack using 8× Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs working in parallel.