Generate passwords

The tool quickly generates a list of randomized passwords to choose from. When you have memorized a password, or written it down in a safe place, it's strongly recommended that you close the password box immediately in order to avoid that other people get to see it.

The tool can select symbols from four different categories.

To make the passwords as safe as possible you probably want to allow all four categories unless there are technical limitations that prevent you from using certain types of symbols.

The tool tries to pick equally many symbols from each category, but if the password length is not evenly divisible by the number of categories it is unavoidable that some categories will have to be used one extra time. Everything else about the passwords, the selection of symbols from each category, the ordering of the symbols, and if necessary the selection of categories to be used one extra time, is decided at random.

Passwords that only consist of digits are often called passkeys, passcodes, or simply codes. These types of passwords are common in many real-life situations (e.g. ATM machines and combination locks) where the person has to be physically present and is forced to enter the code manually. Numeric passwords are generally considered too weak to be used on the web because the process of trying all possible combinations can often be automated using programs.

Websites and other digital services often use passwords to verify the identity of users. To prevent other people from maliciously verifying themselves as another user the password has be be kept secret and should not be too easy to guess (not even for a computer program). For this reason there are often minimal requirements on the password length, and sometimes also on the types of symbols that must be used. Passwords are often allowed to be of any length (within reason) and to contain any type of symbol that are technically possible.

This tool uses only the most commonly available symbols that can easily be typed with most English keyboards. To further increase the security you can replace a few symbols with more uncommon symbols, but keep in mind that you might be using the password from different computers. How to type a certain symbol can depend on the operating system and the keyboard that you are using, and sometimes there is no easy way.

Randomized passwords are often relatively safe (as long as they aren't too short) but they are at the same time hard to remember. It can therefore be tempting to reuse the same password in multiple different places but this is not recommended from a security point of view. Servers might get hacked, the network traffic might get intercepted, and in some cases the people that runs the website can not be trusted. It is particularly important never to reuse the same password for one's e-mail account.