How Secure Is Your Password?

Passwords are a key component to our online lives.  They have a very important job – to help keep our data and personal information safe.  But how secure is your password?  Is your password strong enough to keep people from gaining unauthorized access through using a password cracking technique known as brute forcing?  How Secure Is My Password is a website which will tell you how long it would take for a brute force attack to crack your password if it were running on an average desktop PC.

The website uses a relatively simple algorithm to calculate the time it would take to crack a password.  It takes the number of possible characters to the power of the length of the password and then divides that by the number of calculations per second (which in this case is 10 million).  For those who are concerned about their security (which is a legitimate concern), I would recommend not inputting your actual password, but one that is close to it.  It should give you an idea how secure your password actually is.

However, I should also note the site uses JavaScript to do the calculations which is a client-side scripting language.  This means the password is not transmitted over the Internet (which would be a security risk).  You can test this method by loading the site and disconnecting yourself from the Internet – it will still work.  Additionally, if you disable JavaScript on the site, it will not work.  You will not even be able to use it.  Two things which may give you some more comfort using the service.

More information provided directly from the sites FAQ:

The bit of code that does the calculations is done in JavaScript. And JavaScript is a “client-side” language. That means it runs on your computer – not on ours. No data ever travels from your computer back to the website. You can check this by loading up the webpage and then turning off your internet connection. You’ll still be able to use the website to your heart’s content.

Watch the video above for the full demo.  Feel free to leave a comment with how long it would take to crack your password(s).