Password FAQ

Sixteen random characters is the right default for anything a password manager stores for you. Go to 20 or 24 for email, banking and any account that can reset the others. NIST SP 800-63B revision 4 asks for a minimum of 15 characters when the password is the only authenticator, and asks systems to accept at least 64 so passphrases fit.

Yes, and it is the single most important habit on this page. When a site is breached, the leaked email and password pairs are replayed against hundreds of other services within hours. That attack, credential stuffing, causes more account takeovers than password guessing ever did. A unique password contains the damage to one account.

No. Current guidance advises against scheduled rotation. Forced changes push people to predictable variations such as Spring2026! becoming Summer2026!, which makes the next password easier to guess rather than harder. Change a password when there is a reason: a breach notification, a device you no longer control, a password you know you reused, or any sign of unauthorised access.

It is a count of how many guesses an attacker faces, written compactly. Each extra bit doubles that count. Forty bits is about a trillion possibilities, which a GPU cluster clears in seconds. Eighty bits is beyond any offline attack. A random 16 character password from the full keyboard is about 105 bits.

Almost always. Adding one character to a full keyboard password adds 6.6 bits. Adding symbols to a 12 character alphanumeric password adds about 7 bits in total. If a site makes you choose, take the length.

The naive ones are not. Meters that only count character classes will call P@ssw0rd1 strong, when it falls in under a second. Meters built on zxcvbn or a similar model, which check against dictionaries and common patterns, are far closer to reality. Treat any meter as a floor, not a verdict.

For most people it is a reasonable trade off, and vastly safer than reusing a password. The value crosses the network once over HTTPS and is not stored here. For secrets where a compromise would be severe, generate inside your password manager or with an offline tool, so the value never leaves your machine. The regenerate button on our results page rebuilds the password in your own browser using the Web Crypto API.

No. Each password exists only for the page view that displays it. Nothing is written to a log, a database or a file, and nothing is passed to a third party. Close the tab without copying and the value is gone.

PHP random_int, which draws from the operating system cryptographic random source. It is suitable for security purposes, unlike rand or mt_rand. The in browser regenerate button uses crypto.getRandomValues with rejection sampling so the modulo does not bias the result.

A passphrase is a password built from several words picked at random from a list, such as Harbor-Lantern-Copper-Meadow-Trellis-Quartz. Use one for the few secrets you type from memory: your password manager master password, disk encryption, your primary email. Everything else should be a random string your manager remembers for you.

Six from a 2048 word list, which is 66 bits. Five is a minimum, seven if the phrase protects everything else you own. Four words is no longer enough, whatever list it comes from.

No. Human choice collapses the word pool to a few dozen favourites and puts them in grammatical order, which is exactly what cracking tools model. A phrase you invented is typically worth around 20 bits regardless of its length. The randomness has to come from a machine.

It depends on your threat model. Paper is immune to malware and remote attackers, and vulnerable to anyone who walks past your desk. A master passphrase on paper in a locked drawer at home is a defensible backup. Fifty passwords on a sticky note under the keyboard at work is not.

The mainstream ones are well engineered and independently audited. Your vault is encrypted with a key derived from your master passphrase, which the provider never sees, so a breach of the provider yields encrypted blobs. The risk that remains is a weak master passphrase, which is why it should be six or seven random words.

You lose the vault. No support ticket recovers it, because the provider genuinely cannot decrypt your data. Set up the recovery kit and any emergency access feature on the day you create the account, and keep a paper copy somewhere physically safe until the phrase is committed to memory.

It is far better than reusing passwords, and for many people it is a fine starting point. Its limits are ecosystem lock in, vault security tied to your platform account rather than a separate passphrase, and weak sharing and secure note features. Start there if it gets you off reuse, and move to a dedicated manager when you can.

Two factor authentication requires a second proof beyond the password, such as a code from an app or a tap on a hardware key. Yes, you still need it. A strong password defends against guessing. It does nothing against phishing, malware or a breach at the site itself, and that is where the second factor earns its keep.

A hardware security key using FIDO2 is the strongest, because it is bound to the real domain and cannot be phished. An authenticator app generating time based codes is the practical middle ground. SMS codes are the weakest, because a SIM swap redirects them, but they are still far better than no second factor.

A passkey is a key pair stored on your device or in your password manager. The site keeps only the public half, so there is nothing guessable to steal and nothing to phish, and you unlock it with your device biometric or PIN. Adoption is growing but partial: many sites still keep a password fallback, so passwords are not going away yet.

Use a breach checking service such as Have I Been Pwned, or the breach monitoring built into most password managers, which checks your stored credentials automatically. Reputable checkers use k-anonymity, sending only a partial hash prefix so the service never learns your actual password.

Change the password on that site immediately. Then change it anywhere you reused it, which is the part people skip and the part that actually matters. Enable two factor authentication if it is available. Watch for phishing emails referencing the breach, since attackers move fast on fresh lists.

Usually legacy database columns or an old authentication library. It is a bad sign, because a site that hashes properly does not care about input length. Use the maximum they allow, never reuse that password anywhere, and enable a second factor if they offer one.

Nearly always a symbol it does not accept, or a length cap below what you generated. Untick the special characters box on the generator, or lower the length, and add a few characters back to compensate for the smaller character pool.

Lowercase l, digit 1, uppercase I, uppercase O and digit 0 are hard to tell apart in many fonts. Excluding them costs about a quarter of a bit per character, which is negligible at 16 characters and above. Tick the box whenever you will read the password off one screen and type it on another device.

Safer than reusing them, and less safe than a dedicated manager. The main risks are that the vault is often unlocked as long as you are signed into the browser, and that malware targets browser credential stores specifically. If you use it, protect the browser profile with a device password and enable whatever separate encryption passphrase your browser offers.

No. Reuse with a per site suffix, such as MyPasswordFB and MyPasswordGM, is the very first mangling rule applied to any credential dump. One leak reveals the pattern and every other account follows.

No. Sequences such as qwerty, 1qaz2wsx and zxcvbnm are enumerated at the start of every cracking run. They look random and are among the first few thousand candidates tried.

If the site accepts them, yes, they are perfectly good characters and they make passphrases readable. Some older forms strip or trim them, which then locks you out, so test that you can log back in before you rely on it.

It depends far more on how the site stored it than on the password. Twelve random characters from the full keyboard is about 79 bits: around 9 thousand years against unsalted MD5 at a trillion guesses per second, and about 43 billion years against bcrypt at cost 12. If the password was not random, the honest answer is usually seconds.

Reuse. Not shortness, not missing symbols. One password shared across a dozen sites means the weakest of those dozen sets the security of all of them, and there is always a weakest one.