Secure Online Passwords

Use your default password and generate secure passwords on the various web-sites you visit. It’s a definitive fact that most of the people online uses just one, or at most – 3 passwords when they travel around the internet. Often these passwords are way to easy to figure out, either based on family, names, birthdates, soccer clubs or dictionary words. Taken this into consideration and based on some ideas that others suggested, I’ve put together a small tool that will help you make yourself more secure online. Using your default password you can generate website-spesific passwords that would be far harder to break than your ordinary password. The tool uses a hashing algorithm of your choice (SHA1, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512 or MD5). You can also define the maximum length of the password in case you want to make sure that all websites will handle it; good idea would be to limit it to 50 characters.

The hash is then generated based on your password and the website, and using the “PIN code” you enter as salt-base. What you enter as “PIN code” doesn’t really matter, but should be something that you can easily remember. This is just here to make it even harder to replicate the hashes. Here you can enter anything, default is the name of your computer in upper-case. Do note that the combination of password, the pin-code and website needs to be accurate in order to re-produce your password for later entrance. Thus, you should decide for one “pin-code” and stick to that on different computers to make sure you aren’t making it harder on yourself.

You can also tell the application to store your password/pin code for you, so that you don’t need to remember them. The password/pin-code is then encrypted before being stored in the local settings.xml file. All settings are stored in this file, and written when you click the “Exit” button. All you need is the EXE and XML file transferred to other computers to ensure that you have the same configuration on several computers. A good idea could be to put this on a USB stick and bring that with you.

Usage:

The tool is simple to use, enter your password – the pin-code and the website you want to generate a password for. Could be a good idea to explore the settings and test the various settings before you settle for a configuration you would like to use. When entering a website, you only need to enter the basename of the website. For instance, if you would like to register here, you would then just enter www.brudvik.org into the URL textbox, and hit generate. The generated password is what you would use as password. You do not need to remember this password, because next time you want to log in here, you just start the tool again, enter your password/pin-code (unless you allowed the tool to store it), enter www.brudvik.org – and it will generate the password again, which you then can just copy and paste into the login box.

If you have any ideas, thoughts or feedback – then feel free to express them in the comment field below.

Download:

• Secure Online Passwords (8738)