Choosing Strong And Secure Password

Posted by rajivvishwa On August - 27 - 2010

How to choose a strong and secure password? The obvious answer is to choose a very long password and the next answer in the list is to include as much special characters as possible. But doing so would make it more difficult to remember and would even force us to jot it in postits.

But the ideal solution would be to choose a password which takes longer time to crack. Hackers can find someway to crack our password, all we have to make them try stronger and harder. Passwords are usually cracked using a method called as Bruteforce attack where a malicious tool tries to match all the type of password combination available against the target system. More complex the password is, more are the combinations to be tried and less probable it becomes for the tool to guess our password right.

This website, HowSecureIsMyPassword, gives us an idea on how long it takes to crack a password with a normal desktop PC. We can try various combinations, longer password/different character sets and analyze the results.

Time to Crack Calculator

So as mentioned earlier we should choose a password which takes at least more than ‘a year’ to crack. This arbitrary value – ‘a year’ is based on the assumption that we would change our passwords once in every year so by the time the cracker obtains our password, we would have changed it :)

Guys from Whatsmypass have published a list of Top 500 worst passwords, check it out here, and make sure that you don’t use any one of them.

Another site provides crack time matrix of different types of character sets, length based on the system which is used for cracking it. HowSecureIsMyPassword assumes that the cracker uses class D and estimates the time, link.

Comparison of Several Char Combinations

Check the site to calculate approx time taken to crack your password.

HowSecureIsMyPassword

How Secure Is Your Password Info
App Name How Secure Is Your Password
License free
Type online
App URL Download
More Info link
  • http://woodfoldingchairs.org/ Maribeth Mccastle

    Great post. Thanks!

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