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Most password managers can automatically create strong passwords using a cryptographically secure random password generator, as well as calculating the entropy of the generated password. A good password manager will provide resistance against attacks such as key logging , clipboard logging and various other memory spying techniques.
A random password generator is a software program or hardware device that takes input from a random or pseudo-random number generator and automatically generates a password. Random passwords can be generated manually, using simple sources of randomness such as dice or coins , or they can be generated using a computer.
The above calculations of the Diceware algorithm's entropy assume that, as recommended by Diceware's author, each word is separated by a space. If, instead, words are simply concatenated, the calculated entropy is slightly reduced due to redundancy; for example, the three-word Diceware phrases "in put clammy" and "input clam my" become ...
In computing, entropy is the randomness collected by an operating system or application for use in cryptography or other uses that require random data. This randomness is often collected from hardware sources (variance in fan noise or HDD), either pre-existing ones such as mouse movements or specially provided randomness generators.
On the other hand, the generation of a master key requires a higher quality, such as more entropy. And in the case of one-time pads, the information-theoretic guarantee of perfect secrecy only holds if the key material comes from a true random source with high entropy, and thus any kind of pseudorandom number generator is insufficient.
The guessability is not the same as the entropy. "dog" is a high entropy password if you consider that to be three characters taken from the whole Unicode character set. The entropy of XKCD-style passwords is reduced if users, by habit, attempt to make grammatical sentence fragments out of the four words and if the attackers take this into account.
Passwords or passphrases created by humans are often short or predictable enough to allow password cracking, and key stretching is intended to make such attacks more difficult by complicating a basic step of trying a single password candidate. Key stretching also improves security in some real-world applications where the key length has been ...
When the entropy pool is empty, reads from /dev/random will block until additional environmental noise is gathered. [7] The intent is to serve as a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator, delivering output with entropy as large as possible. This is suggested by the authors for use in generating cryptographic keys for high-value ...