Year: 2009

CyberNet News have a clever solution to the age old problem of how to create and remember strong passwords that are extremely resistant to brute force attacks. [via]

Their method seems to be just for the creation of a single password, but I’ve adapted it below for use as a secure generator of unique passwords for websites.

1. Choose a master password, go for something memorable because this will form the basis of every password you’ll generate. e.g. sherlock

2. Get the URL of the website for which you wish to create a secure password. Attention: use just the domain name part to avoid confusion later! You’ll thank me for that, trust me. Valid examples are facebook.com and google.com Bad: http://www.facebook.com and https://mail.google.com/mail/.

3. Go to http://www.onlinefunctions.com/. Enter your master password and the domain name in the “Input” field. e.g. sherlockgoogle.com

4. What we’re going to do is convert this input into an md5 hash. All we need to know about the md5 algorithm is that it’s commonly used to encrypt data.

5. Hit the “Create MD5″ button.

6. Take the first eight characters from the “MD5 hash” field and use it as your new secure password.

The SuperGenPass bookmarklet automates this process if you wish to trust a third party and there is no reason not to given that the source code is available to scrutinise.