One of the problems was the rating of long passwords. The longer the password got, the less points it got. Reason was the redundancy which was applied all the time. Well, I fixed that… and wait, there is more…

Minimum length increased

The minimum length was increased to 6 characters. Five was too short. Therefore the entire score changed and your old password might now return different data.

Redundancy Change

Redundancy has only meaning when the password is equal or shorter the recommended length (right now 8 characters). The influence on longer passwords has been removed, therefore 11111kq!_()*/& is now about 42% and 11111kq!_()*/&1111111111111 is 47%. It was 92% and 59% before. This directly leads to the next improvement.

I also adjusted the redundancy factor slightly.

Significance

Some legacy systems and some nasty software offer to input quite long passwords, but use at the end only the first characters. So we changed the algorithm to reflect that. The new value is named significance. The recommended password length, right now 8 characters, is most significant.

This first part of the password is analyzed separately again and influences the score the most. See the following examples and note how the bad first part influences the rating. This is of course a somewhat artificial assumption but it put makes things more secure.

• 11111111 – 0%, obviously a garbage like password
• aA-.85fG! – 100%, pretty nice, isn’t it?
• aA-.85fG!11111111 – 100%, still nice of course
• 11111111aA-.85fG! – 23%, still a password with some meaning, but due to the usage of a first part that has a zero score, the overall rating does not come up that high

More colors

The complexity indicator has now a color code to make the change more obvious and I pay my tribute to the people who do not want to read

Bottom line

I am looking forward to your comments and suggestions. Feel free to use the tool often and extensively. Do not forget to tell friends about it. Educate them about good password usage.

If you find any strange things, let me know. If you find the tool to strict, let me now. Please include your arguments.

“May the best password win!”

For the programmer in you: We fixed the formatting of float numbers and displaying only two decimal digits now. Function used number.toFixed(2).