Create strong passwords with Password Meter

by Brad Linder Mar 24th 2008

Password Meter is an online tool that will let you find out whether your birthday, anniversary, or dog's name are really as secure as you think they are. But better yet, unlike password analyzers that we've covered in the past, Password Meter will provide you with real-time feedback beyond a security score. It will also show you how the points are calculated.

For example, the more characters you include, the higher your score. The same goes for the type of characters. If you use upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, you're probably in good shape. You'll be docked points if you use just number or just letters, and if you repeat characters you're docked more points.

If you've got too much free time on your hands, you can use another tool we previously covered, Strong Password Generator to create secure passwords and then enter them into the Password Meter to see how they fare. But good luck actually remembering the random passwords created by Strong Password Generator.

[via MakeUseOf]

Tags: password, password-meter

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

dnutz said 1:56PM on 3-24-2008

the % doesn't seem to make much sense. Try this for a password:

fG#2343fF**dR|||

it gets a 0% for it's score....
that's somehow worse than a password of 'bob' which gets a 1%

Tara Kelly said 8:45AM on 3-25-2008

I don't know what that percentage stands for, but I'm getting

fG#2343fF**dR|||

as 82bit on both Keepass and PassPack.

RobD said 2:38PM on 3-24-2008

Feed my passwords, UNENCRYPTED, to an unknown party to "test their strength". I don't think so.

flatluigi said 4:13PM on 3-24-2008

This doesn't seem to be that good:

'password123' scores 41% while 'downs*PASSword10' scores 0%. For that matter, 'password1' scores 21%.

Andrew said 4:22PM on 3-24-2008

!@#$%^&*()
Perfect 10.

Mark said 5:09PM on 3-24-2008

Yeah, this program is awful. I never got the point of programs like this anyway. Is it really that hard to make up a strong password without a program helping you? It's common sense.

nmanguy said 5:11PM on 3-24-2008

Keepass is way better at telling you how strong a password is.

James said 1:27PM on 3-28-2008

Totally ignore the summary % meter -- it looks like they broke the math to tally all the component parts. Just look at the individual scores and add them up yourself -- I think if the score goes over 100%, it might be truncating it to the last 2 digits or something. Either that, or they're penalizing for Deductions as a multiplicative (rather than additive) penalty.

raedence said 2:18PM on 4-19-2008

hi my am is raedence i love to be new on the my space!!!

mzburf said 10:15AM on 5-18-2008

I'm not web-savvy but my concern is what if this website(www.passwordmeter.com) is trying to get our password for their own scam uses? By entering our passwords or potential passwords they would have them...right?

Thanks!

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