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Passphrase or random string — which is stronger?

Strength is not a property of how a password looks. It is the size of the set it was drawn from, expressed in bits, and it only means anything when the password was chosen at random.

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
8 characters, letters and digits47.6 bits218,340,105,584,896fair
12 characters, letters and digits71.5 bits3.23×10^21strong
16 characters, with symbols103.1 bits1.08×10^31great
4-word passphrase51.7 bits3.66×10^15fair
6-word passphrase77.5 bits2.21×10^23strong

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.

Attack47.6b71.5b103.1b51.7b77.5b
Online, rate-limited (10 guesses/sec)345,939 years5.1×10^12 years1.7×10^22 years5.8×10^6 years3.5×10^14 years
Online, no throttling (1 000/sec)3,459 years5.1×10^10 years1.7×10^20 years57,928 years3.5×10^12 years
Offline, slow hash — bcrypt cost 12 (20 000/sec)173 years2.6×10^9 years8.5×10^18 years2,896 years1.8×10^11 years
Offline, fast hash — salted SHA-256 on 8 GPUs (100 billion/sec)18 minutes511 years1.7×10^12 years5.1 hours35,027 years
Offline, well-funded (100 trillion/sec)1.1 seconds187 days1.7×10^9 years18 seconds35 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.

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