Pass The Words

Sixteen characters using upper case, lower case, digits and symbols is the practical target. At that length a truly random password carries about 105 bits of entropy, which resists an offline attack running 10 billion guesses per second for longer than the universe has existed. Twelve characters still holds up at roughly 79 bits. Eight characters does not: the same attack exhausts it in under four days, which is why eight-character minimums are now considered obsolete.

No. An eight-character password drawn from the full keyboard is worth about 53 bits of entropy, and a modern GPU rig guessing 10 billion combinations per second works through that in roughly four days. If the password uses only letters, or contains a dictionary word, it falls far faster than that. Treat eight characters as a legacy minimum that no longer protects anything of value.

They are safer than what people realistically choose. A six-word passphrase with a digit is worth about 73 bits of entropy, which holds off an offline attack for thousands of years, and most people can memorise it after reading it twice. The catch is word count: four words is only about 50 bits and falls in around fifteen hours, so short passphrases are a false sense of security. Length is what carries a passphrase, not cleverness.

No. Current NIST guidance in SP 800-63B advises against forced periodic rotation, because it pushes people toward predictable variations such as appending an incrementing number. Change a password when there is evidence of compromise, when it appears in a breach corpus, or when you have reused it somewhere else. Otherwise a long, unique, unrotated password is stronger than a short one changed four times a year.

It is, provided the generator runs entirely on your device and uses the browser cryptographic random number generator rather than a predictable one. Pass The Words generates every password locally through the Web Crypto API. Nothing you generate is transmitted, logged or stored on a server, and the page keeps working with the network disconnected, which you can verify by going offline and reloading.

Through k-anonymity. Your password is hashed in your browser and only the first five characters of that hash are sent to the breach service, which returns every known match sharing that prefix. The comparison then happens on your device. The service never receives your password, the full hash, or enough information to work out which one you checked.

Entropy measures how many guesses an attacker must work through, expressed as a power of two. A password with 50 bits of entropy sits somewhere in a space of 2 to the 50th possibilities, and each additional bit doubles that space. It is a far more honest measure than a strength bar, because it is derived from how the password was generated rather than from surface traits like whether it happens to contain a symbol.

Because most of them score appearance rather than resistance to guessing. A meter that rewards one capital, one digit and one symbol will rate Password1! highly even though it is among the first combinations any attacker tries. Meaningful scoring has to account for dictionary words, keyboard runs, dates, repeats and leetspeak substitutions, all of which let an attacker skip most of the search space.