What is a secure password? Sure, “John” is completely trivial, especially if your account name is John Doe, but is “12John93” much better? How long would it take for someone to hack your email account and get access to the confidential data that could make you lose your job?
When it comes to secure passwords, there are a lot of questions to be asked, and while the answers are very straightforward, some people simply won’t understand. Yesterday, for example, I helped a relative of mine create a new Yahoo! account, because she was running into some problems. What kind of problems? Her password contained the user name, or at least that’s what it seems. Sure, she said the password I chose was “ugly,” but at least it’s going to take some time to crack it!
If you want to offer your users info on the average time it should take for someone to hack into your account, then Password Strength is a great solution, although some results you’ll get are pretty funny (a few thousand years needed to crack a 9 characters password? come oooon!).
To make a short story even shorter, I will conclude by saying that Password Strength is a jQuery plugin built to estimate how long would it take for a hacker to crack your password using the ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery software together with some high end video card.
Sure, we’re talking about the brute force method used on Windows Vista passwords here, but using this script to figure out how safe are your other passwords is also a smart choice. After all, using Password Strength is as easy as 1-2-3, but I don’t want to turn this article into a spoiler, so I’ll stop here…
Compatibility: any major browser, as long as JavaScript is enabled
