The Security Mentor

The prolific Jeremy Gillick wrote us a Firefox extension to create random passwords. It works quite a bit differently from pwdhash, which we discussed last time.

Secure Password Generator is simply a dialog box that builds passwords out of random letters, numbers, and punctuation and then lets you copy them to the clipboard.

Random passwords are hard to remember but you can let Firefox remember them for you. There's a feature to make passwords easier to pronounce (a checkbox called "mnemonic"), but it weakens the passwords more than I'm comfortable with.

You can customize SecurePassword Generator six ways from Sunday. There's even a feature to restrict the contents of a password to keys you can reach with just one hand, so you can type a password with one hand while the other is free for the mouse or something.