Even before security became one of the top issues on the Internet, remembering passwords was a hassle, admit it. Far too many of us recycle the same password or few passwords, over and over, knowing that we shouldn’t, and hoping that nobody catches on to us, tricks us into revealing our password, or hacks a file containing our passwords. Because, let’s face it, creating a brand new password for each new website, account, or forum, and then remembering all those passwords, is nearly impossible without resorting to such crutches.
Until now.
Nic Wolff, a self-professed Perl hacker from New York City, has created a nifty, secure password generator.
The way it works is this: you think up a master password. It could be anything, but for the sake of example let’s call it “FooBar”. Whenever you go to a site which requires you to create a password, you call up Nic’s password generator (either from his site, or from a local copy which you can store on your own computer), and it takes your master password, combines it with the name of the site, and then creates an MD5 hash of it (you can think of this as encoding or encrypting it). So, if you needed a new password at the example.com website, the password generator would combine “FooBar” with “www.example.com”, making a password of FooBarwww.example.com, and then convert it to an MDF hash. That MD5 hash of your combined master password and the site name becomes your actual password for that site.
Whenever you need to log in to that site, you just call up the password generator, and it plugs in your encoded password. Nifty cool.
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Even if you have your web browser remember and fill in passwords for you, or even if you let the website store your passwords, each password is unique, and encrypted.
Bravo, Nic, and thank you for making this available for free to the masses!
Go here to check out Nic’s Password Generator.
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
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I’ve been having measured success with Password Depot since 2003. It offers different options and has a toolbar that can sit on the top of your screen to facilitate ease of not having to remember passwords etc. It has a password generator that uses Rijndael 256 for its encryption algorithm.
Probably the best password management utility was initially developed by Bruce Schneier, a cryptography and security expert, from CounterPane. The utility has since been taken over by a group at Sourceforge.net. It provides all the functionality that the other mentioned utilities provide, but it uses an encryption algorithm that has been highly scrutinized by the cryptographic community and has been deemed very secure. It has yet to be broken.
This is not new. The same method has been available for at least a couple of years at www.onepassword.com. Onepassword install a toolbar button which you click on whenever you need a secure password, and a dialog box with the site name already filled in pops up. You enter your master password and voila! You have your site password which is then fed automatically to the password field on the page, or copied to your clipboard, or both. Free and available for both IE and Firefox.