Password Generator & Analyzer

The Phoenix-based Password Generator & Analyzer is a simple password generator and password strength analysis tool.

Why? #

Building a password generator tool seemed like a good way for me to learn Elixir. It started with a simple tool, genevievecurry/elixir-password-generator, which can be run in an iex session.

After that, the next logical step was to extend it using Phoenix LiveView to build a simple 1-page website. Although Phoenix is far more powerful than is necessary for this task, it was a good introduction to the framework.

Building it #

The password generator uses the 1Password Strong Password Generator as inspiration for generating passwords, with a few modifications. The “memorable” passwords that my tool generates uses words from a list of about ~5000 English words that are between 5-8 characters.

The analysis uses The Password Meter as inspiration for the “common attributes” factors used to score passwords, with a few modifications. A strength rating of 100% is given to passwords that score 150 or higher. These are based loosely around the minimum requirements that many applications set for user accounts.

For “brute-force attack resistance”, zxcvbn is used to test password strength against brute force attacks. I used an elixir port of this library for this project. Dan Wheeler’s essay on how to test for a strong password is an interesting read. He notes that the following are also important factors in password security:

• Preventing online cracking with throttling or CAPTCHAs.
• Preventing offline cracking by selecting a suitably slow hash function with user-unique salts.
• Securing said password hashes.

Screenshots #