Creating Strong Passphrases

A memorable passphrase can help to prevent unauthorized people from accessing files, programs, and other resources, and should be difficult for someone else to guess or crack. A good passphrase contains at least 14 characters and doesn't contain your user name, real name, or company name. A secure password should only contain words from uncommon wordlists (EFF Wordlists/Diceware) and should be significantly different from previous passphrases. Memorable passphrases contain several words mixed with a variety of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols (!@#$%^&*).

How To Generate a Strong Passphrase

Step One: Choose the Character Sets to be used in generating your passphrase.

The options are Uppercase Letters, Lowercase letters, Numbers, Symbols and four specially selected lists of words. Select the character sets you want included in your passphrase by placing a check next to it. Uncheck any you do not want to use.

Step Two: Select the length of your passphrase

You can select a passphrase length between 9 characters and 63 characters long. If you want a passphrase of slightly random length you can set the minimum and maximum length to the range you would like it to fall betwee. If you want a specific length, simply slide the Min Length and Max Length sliders to the same length. If you select 22 for the Min Length and 26 for the Max Length the algorithm will keep adding characters or words onto the end of the new passphrase until it reaches the Max Length if it is not already the minimum length.

Step Three: Click the refresh arrows in the text box at the top of the page to generate your passphrase

You might also like this article: What is the most secure type of password? over at Passwordclinic.com.

What is a Strong Passphrase Generator?

A random passphrase generator is a cryptographically safe tool configured to automatically create lengthy, unique, and impossible-to-guess user passphrases. Every random passphrase is highly secure since it’s backed by an algorithm built to find the optimal combination of numbers, upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols for a highly-secure passphrase. The built-in randomness can be fine-tuned to fit the password guidelines recommended by multiple websites.