Over the past year I’ve been taking online privacy more seriously and began looking at alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Startpage. In addition, when creating strong passwords I turn to tools such as KeePass and Strong Password Generator. Earlier today I duckducked strong password, and formed a smile on my face when I saw this:
Well now how cool is that? Very cool.
Even cooler, however, is using DuckDuckGo’s pwgen feature to create passwords of varying strengths and lengths. Duckduck pwgen strong 16 to get something like:
If you prefer a “lower strength” password, you can use the low parameter, for example, pwgen low 24. Or, just average strength with pwgen 32 (the strength parameter is omitted).
From looking at the difference in output between low, average, and high strength passwords, it appears that:
- low strength passwords are created from the character set
[a-zA-Z] - medium strength passwords include numbers, increasing the set to
[0-9a-zA-Z] - high strength passwords include symbols in the set
[!@#$%^&*()](note that the brackets are not in the set, this is regular expression bracket notation)
Instant Answers
This DuckDuckGo feature uses instant answers, an increasingly common feature of search engines. Each DuckDuckGo instant answer has an entry page, and the password generator is (aptly) named Password. You can even review the Perl source code on Github: Password.pm
Closing Thoughts
To be honest, I think this is a pretty cool feature. Now we could argue as to what constitutes a “strong” password, but we won’t. We could discuss entropy, passwords vs. passphrases, and so on. But we won’t. For a quick way to generate a pretty doggone good password, though, just duckduck one.
