Passphrase Generator: Memorable Security
Generate strong diceware passphrases — multiple words, separators, and entropy calculation.
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Passphrase Generator: Memorable Security Part of our complete guide to this topic — see the full series. Passphrases solve the fundamental tension of password security: complexity fights memorability. A string like is harder to remember than it looks and weaker than it seems. Five random words from a large wordlist — — are both easier to remember and orders of magnitude stronger. --- Why Character Complexity Is Overrated? Password composition rules that demand uppercase, lowercase, digits, and symbols have a poor security record. NIST SP 800-63B §5.1.1 explicitly deprecated this approach in 2017 after research showed: Users respond by making minimal changes: satisfies most requirements Composition rules reduce the effective search space because humans are predictable Frequent forced…
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a passphrase?
A passphrase is a password made from a sequence of random words rather than a random mix of characters. The words are chosen from a large wordlist using a cryptographic random process, producing a secret that is both highly entropic and human-memorable. 'correct-horse-battery-staple' is the canonical example.
How secure is a 4-word passphrase?
A 4-word EFF diceware passphrase has about 51.7 bits of entropy. At 10 billion guesses per second, an offline attacker would need around 40,000 years on average to crack it. For high-value accounts, use 5–6 words to reach 65–78 bits, which is infeasible to crack with any foreseeable hardware.
What is the difference between a password and a passphrase?
A traditional password uses a short string of mixed characters; a passphrase uses multiple dictionary words. Passphrases are longer (more entropy) yet easier to remember because humans recall words better than arbitrary character strings. The security comes from the number of words and the randomness of selection, not from character complexity.
What is the Diceware word list?
Diceware is a method created by Arnold Reinhold in 1995. A word list maps every 5-digit combination (11111–66666) to a word. Rolling five physical dice and looking up the result gives one word. The EFF published an improved 7,776-word list in 2016 designed for memorability — no abbreviations, no obscure terms.
How do I calculate passphrase entropy?
Entropy = log₂(wordlist_size) × word_count. With the EFF Large List (7,776 words): each word contributes log₂(7776) ≈ 12.92 bits. Five words = 64.6 bits; six words = 77.5 bits. Add a random separator character between words to gain a few extra bits.
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