isPasswordOK?

Not sure how resistant is your password to real world hacker password enumeration vectors? There’s an app for that.

The folks over at Literatecode have developed an IPhone app called isPasswordOK to help the average person select a strong password.

When users sign-up for online services they are often asked to give a password. They enter the password, as an example…”Password”, this doesn’t pass the test on the blog sign-up form? However “P4ssw0rd” passes the test (there’s a Javascript “password strength” indicator script that assesses password strength allegedly), but those meters do not take into account real world enumeration/ccracking techniques. Generally the user is told they have a “Good” or “fair” password as long as their password passes the format test (e.g. One upper case, one lower case, one punctuation mark) . Clearly to those in the know, P4ssw0rd is a bad password, but not according to most online registration form strength indicators.

Passwords authentication poses a nightmare for users and security departments. They can’t be too complex because then they get written down somewhere where others can see them (in one case the employee wrote a password on the ceiling board over their desk). Then…obviously they can’t be too simple. But passwords are all we have in many cases, so let’s do our best to choose a good one – and this is not as simple as many folk believe it to be.

This app is a nice innovation, long overdue, and sorely needed, as demonstrated by the myriad of password compromises globally.