Password Generator

April 11, 2013 3:44 PM

Password Generator
Using the same password for multiple email, e-commerce and social networking websites is risky, but the majority of web users still do it. This tool allows you to generate unique passwords for a bunch of popular websites in one step.

This is an extra-strong password generator which uses an SHA-256 hash to produce 20 character passwords. This is an update on a previous project, which generates 10 digit passwords and which is still available here.

There are of course many other password apps, so I've also written a page summarising some popular choices as an aid to choosing the best tool to match your needs.

You can save your own copy of the page for use off-line, there are no dependent files, just save as a single HTML file.

Role: Coding, design

posted by Lanark (3 comments total)

Nifty. I'm tempted to download the page and tweak it to list just the websites I use. Of course, I've already gone to the trouble of generating random passwords for the important sites I use (short, but still...). I really can't be arsed to do it again.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 3:30 PM on April 16, 2013

Thanks to 'It's Never Lurgi', this has now been tweaked so that if you save a local copy it is really easy to customise the list of websites - just edit the page in any text or HTML editor.

Alternatively for any website that's not on the list, just type the name into the 'Custom' box (the last one in the list) and press Generate.
posted by Lanark at 11:52 AM on April 19, 2013

So SS64 is is effectively:

base64(sha1(mypassword:ebay))

This just adds needless complexity to a problem that you stated but haven't solved: Complex passwords are hard to remember but also hard to generate. All that's done here is made complex passwords impossible to remember but easy to generate.

So the real question is, how can complex passwords be easy to remember and hard to generate?

For most people most of the time, they are not facing someone who is dedicated to discovering their password. And if they are, there are easier ways of getting a password than brute force cracking; stealing cookies, shoulder surfing, phishing, social engineering, etc., etc.

I do like your summary page, you might want to add PasswordCard, which has a novel approach to generating passwords without the need of a computer in the generation chain.
posted by tarpin at 3:32 AM on May 14, 2013