Microsoft creates tool to help make your passwords stronger

Internet giant Microsoft wants you to have a very secure password. It has gone ahead and developed a tool that will tell you how vulnerable your current

Nishtha Kanal|Dec 09, 2013, 10:27:57 IST

Microsoft wants you to have a very difficult-to-crack password. So it has gone ahead and developed a tool that will show you just how weak your current password is against the forces of hacking. The result is a tool called Telepathwords, that Microsoft hopes will improve the password hygiene on the internet.

Urging you to type in any of your existing passwords into a box, the tool guesses the next alphabet of your password even as you’re entering it. For that nifty trick, it uses knowledge from common password selection behaviour, common phrases and some passwords that have been made public thanks to security breaches.

Check it out to know if you have a bad password

Microsoft explains, "To guess the next character you'll type, we send the characters you have already typed to query our prediction engine. The prediction engine uses a database of common passwords and phrases that is too large for us send to your computer.” Essentially, if the tool manages to predict the next letter of your password, it’s pretty weak.

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Telepathwords also sends and maintains a log of your mouse movements and the timings of when characters are added to or removed from your password. You need not worry about your privacy and security since this is only to see how much of an effect this tool has on your behaviour and does not collect the actual characters you type. This is just for research purposes.

“To protect the contents of the log, we encrypt log entries on your browser, before they are sent to our server. We do not keep the keys required to decrypt the log on any publicly-facing server. (Our servers create a random, unique key for each log, transfer that key to your client, and encrypt the key with a public key that is not stored on any publicly-facing server.),” assures Microsoft.

If you’re brave enough to want to know how unsafe your password probably is, head over to Telepathwords.

By Nishtha Kanal

Intrigued by all things social, Nishtha will invariably tweet about you. When not tweeting or writing about the next viral video, you will hear her proclaiming her love to Metallica, James Hetfield, Opeth, Akerfeldt and all bands that go 'growl'. She also obsesses about ACP Pradyuman and South Park and you will always find her moving around with a book. Her focus is on all the happening stuff in the tech domain, and she won't hesitate to take a shot at some of the oddball devices that make their way to our labs.