Password cracking programs typically use the dictionary attack or the brute force method to break your "strong" password. And you don’t really need a super-computer for guessing passwords, just enough time depending on how strong or weak the original password is.
If you like to know how long will it take for an average home computer to guess your password, try the Hackosis calculator. Just type in the count of various characters (lowercase, uppercase, numbers, etc.) and the tool will give you a time estimate.
For instance, it will take around two months for your computer to guess a reasonably strong password with 5 lowercase, 2 uppercase and 4 numbers (see screenshot above) but more common passwords like "test", "password" or "123" can be cracked in negligible time.
In case you like to use the password tool offline, get this spreadsheet.
Related: Retrieve Passwords in IE and Firefox
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/how-strong-is-your-password/5160/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
I have been using combination of letters & numbers in my password, but this tool shows me how weak my password is. I guess many of the readers will start to change their passwords as soon as they use this calculator.
Written by Kamal on 10.31.08
Password is not a good key on computer anymore. Now we may need better key like crypto or something like this.
Written by Bauani on 10.31.08
@kamal I agree with you I have to change my password after using this caluculator,My password can crack at 0.01 hours the weakest .
Written by venkat on 10.31.08
One of my information technology classes had a guest lecturer that was a former professional hacker once. He had us all write down our passwords for our campus email accounts a week beforehand and he ran a program that he designed and showed us the results of how long it would’ve taken him to crack our passwords. It was incredible how quickly he could’ve accessed my information, and how “strong” I thought my weak password was.
Written by Cool Products on 10.31.08
It’s not like anyone going to bruteforce passwords that can often be sniffed or cracked in few minutes with rainbow tables.
On other hand that page would end up with very nice dictionary in the end. :)
Written by Rarst on 10.31.08
77,331,317,568,362,617,000.00 days
thats good news I guess, anyway are there any mathematicians around here? Can the above number help you guess how many small char, no and symbols my pass has ??
Written by Supreet on 10.31.08
My Computer password revealed the following:
Your password is 18 characters long and has 5,429,503,678,975,999,737,856 combinations.
It takes 19,752,419,317.14 hours or 823,017,471.55 days to crack your password on computer that tries 137,438,953,472 passwords per hour. This is based on a typical PC processor in 2008 and that the processor is under 10% load.
SO I can be pretty safe in this respect.
Written by Navjot Singh on 11.03.08
To Supreet: I am sure, that any CCTV system can follow your password when you type it on your keyboard …
Written by Bauani on 11.03.08
Yes, you can generate hash codes of possible passwords and compare them against saved version, but in most cases this is not applicable because many new OSs make delays between these checks.
Written by Reza on 11.03.08