Correct Horse Battery Staple: Better passwords with Vietnamese

Submitted by tomo on August 15, 2011 - 1:13am

Inspired by XKCD, this is a password generator for those of you who know English and Vietnamese or another language. Once a random set of words in your languages has been generated, images for those words will be shown to help you visually remember your new password. If the random password seems too hard to remember, you can always spin the wheel a second time!

Each time you click, 4 random words from the selected languages will be loaded. I chose the number 4 so as to not overload Google Image search, so you may want to run it twice to get 5 or more words for added security. I find that the images help to visually remember the password.

If you still want a password like "!Agt:m%p>" then it's also an option below.

Choose Languages

English

Vietnamese

Japanese

German

French

Your Random Password

Click that button up there!

Or use this harder to remember but shorter string of 9 characters

The other day there was an XKCD strip about password security. The idea is that we've been trained over the years to use passwords like 'Tr0ub4dor&3' because they mix upper and lower case, use numbers, and special characters. But a password like that is based on a common English word using a common substitution pattern (l33tsp34k) of letters for numbers and is much easier for a hacker to guess than four random words like 'correct horse battery staple', which is longer but much easier to remember.

A good password should be random. Humans aren't random and 'Tr0ub4dor' looks random enough but it isn't. Even translating the word into a foreign language is by itself weak. Generally, if you come up with the password yourself then it's not anything close to random.

Plenty of software exists to come up with passwords made up of random characters. The problem is that these passwords weren't meant to be memorized. Writing your password down somewhere sort of defeats the purpose.

So four random English words makes a pretty good password, but is still hard to remember if they are obscure and unfamiliar words. Out of the over one hundred thousand words in an English dictionary a few thousand are commonly used.

So a few thousand English words are generally useful. But those of us who are bilingual can basically double the size of the vocabulary used! This foreign language random password generator seeks to take advantage of that numerical weapon, and with a large number of possible languages (and even more language combinations), even if a hacker got an encrypted password file it would be as hard to crack as a random 9-character totally impossible to remember string.

You can increase the security of your password further by using a "salt" random string (non-dictionary word) that you remember and always use with your passwords, and by adding punctuation in one of the words.

UPDATE: There is now a Chrome extension that makes creating passwords on the fly really fast and easy! Check out the Correct Horse Battery Staple Google Chrome Extension

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