PPasswordForge
Get PasswordForge

PasswordForge · password strength

How strong is a 14-character password?

A random 14-character password carries between 65.8 and 90.2 bits of entropy, depending on which characters it may contain. The table below gives the exact figure for each alphabet, and what each attack speed would need to exhaust it.

These numbers describe a password generated at random. A password a person invented — a name, a date, a word with letters swapped for digits — is worth a fraction of the same length, because an attacker guesses the pattern, not the alphabet. Entropy measures the dice, not the string.

Entropy and keyspace

AlphabetEntropyPossible passwordsVerdict
Lowercase letters (a-z)65.8 bits6.45×10^19strong
Letters, both cases (A-Z a-z)79.8 bits1.06×10^24strong
Letters and digits (A-Z a-z 0-9)83.4 bits1.24×10^25great
Letters, digits and symbols90.2 bits1.42×10^27great

Time to exhaust half the keyspace

Each column states the guess rate it assumes. A crack time quoted without a rate is meaningless — the same password is minutes or millennia depending on whether the attacker is typing into a login form or running eight GPUs against a stolen hash.

Attack65.8b79.8b83.4b90.2b
Online, rate-limited (10 guesses/sec)1.0×10^11 years1.7×10^15 years2.0×10^16 years2.3×10^18 years
Online, no throttling (1 000/sec)1.0×10^9 years1.7×10^13 years2.0×10^14 years2.3×10^16 years
Offline, slow hash — bcrypt cost 12 (20 000/sec)5.1×10^7 years8.4×10^11 years9.8×10^12 years1.1×10^15 years
Offline, fast hash — salted SHA-256 on 8 GPUs (100 billion/sec)10 years167,461 years2.0×10^6 years2.3×10^8 years
Offline, well-funded (100 trillion/sec)3.7 days167 years1,965 years225,494 years

Generate one at this strength

The generator runs in your browser using the operating system's cryptographic random source — nothing is sent anywhere. Pick a length or a word count, see the entropy update as you go, and export a batch when you need many at once.

Open PasswordForge

Other strength questions