Password checker

Your online accounts, computer files, and personal information are more secure when you use strong passwords to help protect them.

Test the strength of your passwords: Enter a password in the text box to have Password Checker help determine its strength as you type.

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Note: Password Checker can help you to gauge the strength of your password. It is for personal reference only. Password Checker does not guarantee the security of the password itself.

Do you use strong passwords?

A strong password should appear to be a random string of characters to an attacker. It should be 14 characters or longer, (eight characters or longer at a minimum). It should include a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.

About Password Checker

Password Checker does not collect, store, or transmit information beyond the computer that you use to access Password Checker. The image works on your computer desktop until you navigate away from the page.

The security of the passwords entered into Password Checker is similar to the security of the password you enter when you log into Windows. The password is checked and validated on your computer, but is not sent over the Internet.

Create a Strong, Memorable Password

Create a strong, memorable password in 6 steps

Use these steps to develop a strong password

1. Think of a sentence that you can remember. This will be the basis of your strong password or pass phrase. Use a memorable sentence, such as "My son Aiden is three years old."

2. Check if the computer or online system supports the pass phrase directly. If you can use a pass phrase (with spaces between characters) on your computer or online system, do so.

3. If the computer or online system does not support pass phrases, convert it to a password. Take the first letter of each word of the sentence that you've created to create a new, nonsensical word. Using the example above, you'd get: "msaityo".

4. Add complexity by mixing uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. It is valuable to use some letter swapping or misspellings as well. For instance, in the pass phrase above, consider misspelling Aiden's name, or substituting the word "three" for the number 3. There are many possible substitutions, and the longer the sentence, the more complex your password can be. Your pass phrase might become "My SoN Ayd3N is 3 yeeRs old." If the computer or online system will not support a pass phrase, use the same technique on the shorter password. This might yield a password like "MsAy3yo".

5. Finally, substitute some special characters. You can use symbols that look like letters, combine words (remove spaces) and other ways to make the password more complex. Using these tricks, we create a pass phrase of "MySoN 8N i$ 3 yeeR$ old" or a password (using the first letter of each word) "M$8ni3y0".

6. Test your new password with Password Checker. Password Checker is a non-recording feature on this Web site that helps determine your password's strength as you type.

What makes a strong password

To an attacker, a strong password should appear to be a random string of characters. The following criteria can help your passwords do so:

Make it lengthy. Each character that you add to your password increases the protection that it provides many times over. Your passwords should be 8 or more characters in length; 14 characters or longer is ideal.

Many systems also support use of the space bar in passwords, so you can create a phrase made of many words (a "pass phrase"). A pass phrase is often easier to remember than a simple password, as well as longer and harder to guess.

Combine letters, numbers, and symbols. The greater variety of characters that you have in your password, the harder it is to guess. Other important specifics include:

The fewer types of characters in your password, the longer it must be. A 15-character password composed only of random letters and numbers is about 33,000 times stronger than an 8-character password composed of characters from the entire keyboard. If you cannot create a password that contains symbols, you need to make it considerably longer to get the same degree of protection. An ideal password combines both length and different types of symbols.

Use the entire keyboard, not just the most common characters. Symbols typed by holding down the "Shift" key and typing a number are very common in passwords. Your password will be much stronger if you choose from all the symbols on the keyboard, including punctuation marks not on the upper row of the keyboard, and any symbols unique to your language.

Use words and phrases that are easy for you to remember, but difficult for others to guess. The easiest way to remember your passwords and pass phrases is to write them down. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing wrong with writing passwords down, but they need to be adequately protected in order to remain secure and effective.

Factors in the security of a password system

The security of a password-protected system depends on several factors. The system must, of course, be designed for sound overall security, without which no password protection can have any significance. Early passwords on many systems were limited to a few numbers, or upper-case-letters, only often in prescribed patterns limiting the number of possible passwords. Most passwords today usually have fewer such limits. User input is determined by several limiting factors: allowable inputs (numbers / letters, non-visual codes and/or other keys / device inputs), minimum & maximum of time required for input, availability of cut / delete / paste / copy for input, and error/noise tolerance errors in the password or communications input. Some system administrators also enforce other limitations on passwords, such as compulsory change schedules, safe-password analysis feedback, and compulsory length / composition limits. See computer security and computer insecurity.

Designing a personal, user-friendly password

Designing a personal, user-friendly password

Passwords vary in the degree of public awareness, security protection and frequency of change. The most public, and therefore least secure, password might be one that is given to members of a group, a committee or some other organization. For instance, "publiclibrary", "internet", "AAAfinancecommittee" or "password" are all examples of easily remembered passwords, more or less publicly known passwords.

Less easily attacked passwords might be built from such a basic form, for instance, "smith12nov34street" or "AAAchairpersonSUE". These are slightly more secure, but being relatively easily predictable should not be relied upon to actually block unauthorized access. Effective access control requires passwords which are more difficult to guess or to find automatically, less publicly known (ideally not at all), and these are the subject of much of the rest of this article. One method of creating passwords that are memorable, but difficult to attack are by means of selective substitution of numbers for letters, e.g. 'I' is replaced by '1', 'E' by '3' etc. This becomes even more secure if the numbers are 'shifted' on the keyboard. In this instance, the number '1' may be replaced by '!'.

Authentication Factor

An authentication factor is a piece of information used to authenticate or verify a person's identity for security purposes. Human authentication factors are generally classified into three cases:

Something the user has (e.g., ID card, security token, software token, phone, or cell phone)

Something the user knows (e.g., a password, pass phrase, or personal identification number (PIN))

Something the user is or does (e.g., fingerprint, retinal pattern, DNA sequence, signature, voice recognition, unique bio-electric signals, or another biometric identifier)

Often a combination of methods is used to provide multi-factor authentication. For example, bank machines provide two-factor authentication by requiring a bankcard and a PIN. Business networks may require users to provide a password and a random number from a security token.

Provenance

Provenance is the origin or source from which something comes, and the history of subsequent owners (also known in some fields as chain of custody). The term is often used in the sense of place and time of manufacture, production or discovery. Comparative techniques, expert opinion, written and verbal records and the results of tests are often used to help establish provenance.

The provenance of works of fine art, antiques and antiquities often assumes great importance. Documented evidence of provenance for an object can help to establish that it has not been altered and is not a forgery, reproduction, stolen or looted art. Knowledge of provenance can help to assign the work to a known artist and a documented history can be of use in helping to prove ownership.

The quality of provenance of an important work of art can make a considerable difference to its selling price in the market; this is affected by the degree of certainty of the provenance, the status of past owners as collectors, and in many cases by the strength of evidence that an object has not been illegally excavated or exported from another country. The provenance of a work of art may be recorded in various forms depending on context or the amount that is known, from a single name to an entry in a full scholarly catalogue several thousand words long.

Evidence of provenance can be of importance in the fields of archaeology and palaeontology. Fakes are not unknown and finds are sometimes removed from the context in which they were found without documentation, reducing their value to the world of learning. Even when discovered apparently in-situ archaeological finds must sometimes be treated with caution, the provenance of a find may not be properly represented by the context in which it was found. Artifacts can be moved far from their place of origin by mechanisms that include looting, collecting, theft or trade and further research is often required to establish the true provenance of a find. Fossils can also move from their primary context and are sometimes found, apparently in-situ, in geological deposits to which they do not belong, moved by, for example, the erosion of nearby but geologically different outcrops.

Most museums make strenuous efforts to record how the works in their collections were acquired and these records are often of use in helping to establish provenance.

Provenance is a fundamental principle of archives, referring to the individual, group, or organization that created or received the items in a collection. According to archival theory and the principle of provenance, records of different provenance should be separated.

In archival practice, proof of provenance is provided by the operation of control systems that document the history of records kept in an archive, including details of amendments made to them. It was developed in the nineteenth century by both French and Prussian archivists.

In North American archaeology, and to a lesser extent in anthropological archaeology throughout the world, the term provenience is sometimes used instead. Usually the two terms are synonymous; however, some researchers use provenience to refer only to the exact location in a site where an artifact was excavated, in contrast to provenance which includes the artifact's complete documented history

Authentication

Authentication (from Greek αυθεντικός; real or genuine, from authentes; author) is the act of establishing or confirming something (or someone) as authentic, that is, that claims made by or about the thing are true. Authenticating an object may mean confirming its provenance, whereas authenticating a person often consists of verifying their identity. Authentication depends upon one or more authentication factors.

Password

Password

A Password is a form of secret authentication data that is used to control access to a resource. The password is kept secret from those not allowed access, and those wishing to gain access are tested on whether or not they know the password and are granted or denied access accordingly.

The use of passwords goes back to ancient times. Sentries guarding a location would challenge for a password. They would only allow a person in if they knew the password. In modern times, passwords are used to control access to protected computer operating systems, mobile phones, cable TV decoders, automated teller machines (ATMs), etc. A typical computer user may require passwords for many purposes: logging in to computer accounts, retrieving e-mail from servers, accessing files, databases, networks, web sites, and even reading the morning newspaper online.

Despite the name, there is no need for passwords to be actual words; indeed passwords which are not actual words are harder to guess (a desirable property), but are generally harder for users to remember (an undesirable property). Note that password is often used to describe what would be more accurately called a passphrase. Passcode is sometimes taken to imply that the information used is purely numeric, such as the personal identification number (PIN) commonly used for ATM access. Passwords are generally short enough to be memorized.

Your passwords are the keys you use to access personal information that you've stored on your computer and in your online accounts.

If criminals or other malicious users steal this information, they can use your name to open new credit card accounts, apply for a mortgage, or pose as you in online transactions. In many cases you would not notice these attacks until it was too late.

Fortunately, it is not hard to create strong passwords and keep them well protected.