Never Have to Remember a Password Again with this Nifty Secure Password Generator!

Even before security became one of the top issues on the Internet, remembering passwords was a hassle, admit it. Far too many of us recycle the same password or few passwords, over and over, knowing that we shouldn’t, and hoping that nobody catches on to us, tricks us into revealing our password, or hacks a file containing our passwords. Because, let’s face it, creating a brand new password for each new website, account, or forum, and then remembering all those passwords, is nearly impossible without resorting to such crutches.

Until now.

Nic Wolff, a self-professed Perl hacker from New York City, has created a nifty, secure password generator.

The way it works is this: you think up a master password. It could be anything, but for the sake of example let’s call it “FooBar". Whenever you go to a site which requires you to create a password, you call up Nic’s password generator (either from his site, or from a local copy which you can store on your own computer), and it takes your master password, combines it with the name of the site, and then creates an MD5 hash of it (you can think of this as encoding or encrypting it). So, if you needed a new password at the example.com website, the password generator would combine “FooBar” with “www.example.com", making a password of FooBarwww.example.com, and then convert it to an MDF hash. That MD5 hash of your combined master password and the site name becomes your actual password for that site.

Whenever you need to log in to that site, you just call up the password generator, and it plugs in your encoded password. Nifty cool.

Even if you have your web browser remember and fill in passwords for you, or even if you let the website store your passwords, each password is unique, and encrypted.

Bravo, Nic, and thank you for making this available for free to the masses!

Go here to check out Nic’s Password Generator.
Infoworld's Jon Udell has posted a cool movie showing how the generator works in practice.