Comments on: PasswordMaker: Strong Passwords at your Fingertips

By: Julian Knight

Julian Knight — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:26:51 +0000

David makes some useful points to remember. However, the article is about PasswordMaker.

That tool DOES overcome the limitations he lists.

1) You can add a modifier or change the “URL” as it is only used to generate the PW AFAIK – the user name is also used in the pw creation anyway!

2) You can use the modifier for this purpose (add mmyy for example) or use seperate account groups

3) PWM allows any character set to be specified

4) You can use separate account groups. Most only use a subset of possibilities anyway.

So PasswordMaker overcomes the issues that David listed.

I know this is a late response but as this page turned up in a search on Google, I thought the info might be of use to others.

Regards,
Julian Knight

By: David A Teare

David A Teare — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:27:14 +0000

I like the idea of ‘hash based passwords’. SuperGenPass did a great job popularizing this novel approach to passwords. Sadly there are several downsides to using Digest Passwords, including:

1. It is impossible to have unique passwords for multiple accounts on the same domain. While this may seem alright at first glance, imagine having multiple GMail accounts, one for work and one for personal. You would not be able to share your work account’s password with your co-workers since it would be identical to your personal account password.

2. It is impossible to change your password for a website without changing your main password. Changing this password breaks the fundamental benefit of only needing to remember a single password.

3. Generated passwords only use characters and numbers. Any website or application that has specific password requirements (i.e. at least 1 symbol) will not allow the generated password.

4. Most probably you will need to settle on a shorter length for the generated password (6-8 characters) to be acceptable by most of the websites. You can adjust the length of the password for each site, but SuperGenPass is not able to remember the length you chose.

If you don’t mind these limitations, you can use 1Password in conjunction with SuperPassGen as 1Password’s built-in password generator allows you to create Digest passwords that are compatible with SuperGenPass. This allows you to get all the benefits of 1Password, while still being able to ‘remember’ your passwords using SuperGenPass.

By: Omarra Byrd

Omarra Byrd — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:51:52 +0000

I actually love the RoboForm software myself. I use it all of the time and it takes all the menial everyday tasks that I have to perform on my computer daily and shortens them extremely! What once took me fifteen minutes to complete now takes me only one second because RoboForm does the same task with just one click. In fact I wrote a Report about a lot of RoboForm’s capabilities for use that aren’t even touched on in the User’s Manual for RoboForm. You can get that Report here:
http://www.booksbonkers.com/TheRoboFormReport!.html

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:06:22 +0000

I use roboform and it does the same thing.

By: Ramesh | The Geek Stuff

Ramesh | The Geek Stuff — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:23:34 +0000

Mike,

Thanks for the link and article about PasswordMaker, it is definitely a different way of creating and assigning passwords than what we are used to.

On a similar topic, I posted about The Ultimate Guide for Creating Strong Passwords

Ramesh
The Geek Stuff