Test the strength of your passwords with “How Big is Your Haystack”

By | March 2, 2013

There are password strength checkers all over the Web, but there is only one that tests your passwords as brutally as this one. How Big is Your Haystack will test your passwords against three different kinds of attack scenarios and give you an estimate of the time it would take to crack your passwords. We tested ours and most were in the billions of years for two attack scenarios – and around 2 years when pitted against a massive cracking array using one hundred trillion guesses per second.

Here’s what the site’s developers have to say:

“Every password you use can be thought of as a needle hiding in a haystack. After all searches of common passwords and dictionaries have failed, an attacker must resort to a “brute force” search – ultimately trying every possible combination of letters, numbers and then symbols until the combination you chose, is discovered.

If every possible password is tried, sooner or later yours will be found. The question is: Will that be too soon . . . or enough later?

This interactive brute force search space calculator allows you to experiment with password length and composition to develop an accurate and quantified sense for the safety of using passwords that can only be found through exhaustive search…”.

How strong are your passwords? Do you dare to find out? Visit How Big is Your Haystack… if you dare!

 

3 thoughts on “Test the strength of your passwords with “How Big is Your Haystack”

  1. Joan

    Again, thank you. You have warned us more times than I care to count. I created two new ones and they went over the top to try and decipher. I will set aside valuable time and change the rest tomorrow. I wish you had a dollar for all the thank you’s you so richly (now there’s a play on words) receive.

    Reply
  2. Lizza

    HA 40.8 centuries I used one similar but different text that is similar to others I use. That was the last one where it was pitted against the massive cracking array! Maybe some of my passwords are safer than I thought.
    Now one I regularly use for games, etc doesn’t have both caps and normal size and it was only a bit over 2 years when pitted against the massive cracking array. So the upper and lower cases really do matter!

    Reply
  3. Melanie Wood

    Thank you so much! I am changing my p/ws now. 40 centuries to crack my codes ~ I suppose by then I won’t care…

    Reply

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