Password Strength Checker Guide: How Meters Work
Behind the scenes of password strength meters: pattern matching, entropy estimation, dictionary checks, and scoring algorithms.
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Tags: security, passwords, developer-tools
Password Strength Checker: How Zxcvbn Works Most password strength meters are theater. They check for length, the presence of uppercase letters, digits, and symbols, and display a colored bar. They'll tell you is "strong" when it's one of the first passwords any serious cracker would try. Zxcvbn, developed at Dropbox in 2012, takes a fundamentally different approach: instead of checking rules, it models how attackers actually crack passwords and estimates how long your password would take to crack against realistic attacks. The Problem With Rule-Based Strength Meters Rule-based meters count character types. They reward you for including an uppercase letter, a digit, and a symbol, then combine the score into a "strength" rating. The problem is that these rules are orthogonal to actual…
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