Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Generating Secure Passwords

Given that we often have a need to generate secure passwords for the likes of web applications, blogs, social sites, etc. I've been using a wee utility called PWGen for Windows.

PWGen is a password generator capable of creating large amounts of cryptographically-secure passwords or passphrases (from word lists).

It's small, doesn't write to the registry or hard disk and you can choose to use either the number of characters and a character set or use a number of words passphrase.

For Mac OS X, you could use the similarly small and unintrusive RPG or Doorman utilities. Both are free and available from the App Store.

Alternatively, there are some useful online password generators...
Also, once you've got your secure password, it's worth checking it with Microsoft's Password Checker.

4 comments:

Allan Ogg said...

Here's another online and software-based password generator - Password Live
It generates passwords based on a secret key and service name.

Allan Ogg said...

And another, this time from Microsoft, and it will try and guess your next character so can really help avoid easily-guessed passwords - Microsoft Telepathwords.

Allan Ogg said...

Almost forgot about Safe Password Generator, yet another online tool that lets you generate a random password based on length and character type.

Allan Ogg said...

You can even use WolframAlpha to generate randon, secure passwords. Just To get started, go to the wolframalpha.com website and type a natural-language query like "password of n characters" (n is the length of the password) to create your unique password.