Slashdot Mirror

Peak Performance
VNSIII
Whole Body Kinesthetic Displays

Ken

There's a program called twonz that looks pretty good for creating passwords. You give it a password (the "pad") in one box, and an obvious string (like "www.hotmail.com") in another. It then uses SHA1 to generate a hash, base64 encodes it, and gives you the result to use as a password. It doesn't store the passwords, so you don't need to worry about protecting a password file (or keeping it updated between several computers). SHA1 is a one-way hash, so it should be pretty secure (one site could not find the password of another site, even if you use the same pad).

so does his illegitimate daughter, Turm Garten

:)

You might want to check out this program - http://www.interlog.com/~gray/twonz/twonz.html

it takes one secret phrase and hashes it against the hostname (or any other obvious value) using SHA-1 to produce a relatively secure password. Nothing gets stored on disk, and you don't have duplicate passwords.

Of course, if you're on someone's Windoze box and want to log into the NYT, you're SOL unless you can install Perl without them noticing ;-)

Maybe there's still some hard feelings after Microsoft's Hostile takeover attempt a few years ago! ;-)