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Create secure passwords with ViPNet Password Generator

A system is as secure as its weakest link. Quite often, this weakest link is password authentication. There are numerous recommendations regarding the length, content, and lifetime of passwords. Such recommendations are intended for use in the password policies development. Ideally, users should create their own passwords, and then keep them secret. However, studies show that users often create predictable passwords, such as password, 123456, abc123, password1, and so on. It should be borne in mind that in day-to-day speech, we tend to use a few thousand words, while tens of thousands are used in literary works. So, if a password, chosen by a user, is a word which actually exists in the language, there is a 25% likelihood that the word can be found in a 64,000-word dictionary. It normally takes less than one second to check a password. Such a password may be found by searching through a dictionary for 24 hours. This problem can be solved by using passwords which are generated as random sequences of character, but such passwords are hard to memorize, and in 75% of cases users write them down, which is unacceptable from a security point of view. Moreover, 30% of users forget their random passwords within a month. To memorize a random sequence, people need to have a mnemonic aid to create an associative array.

ViPNet Password Generator creates passwords at random, and at the same time produces a phrase-based mnemonic aid to help the user memorize it. To make phrases easier to remember, special dictionaries have been compiled so that phrases are created from natural word-combinations. The use of long passwords tends to result in frequent accidental errors when users enter them, so the password phrases are used to help users memorize the password, but the password itself is formed from several initial letters of words which constitute the phrase.

ViPNet Password Generator features:
• Adjustable number of words in a passphrase
• Customizable password length
• Grammatically correct sentence used as a passphrase
• Support for several languages
• Option to choose the most convenient passphrase
• Generation of random numeric passwords (PIN codes)
• Intuitive, user-friendly interface

You can download the ViPNet Password Generator freeware from the Infotecs website: http://www.infotecs.biz/products/password_generator.php.