July 7, 2026
How to Generate a Strong Password (And What Actually Makes One Strong)
A lot of password advice focuses on the wrong thing. Swapping an "a" for an "@" or adding an exclamation mark at the end feels like it's making a password stronger, but attackers' cracking tools have known these tricks for years — they barely slow anything down. Real password strength comes from two much simpler factors: length and true randomness.
Why length matters more than complexity tricks
Every extra character in a password multiplies the number of possible combinations an attacker would need to try. A random 8-character password might have around 50 bits of entropy — crackable by modern hardware in a practical amount of time. A random 16-character password with the same character variety jumps to roughly 100 bits of entropy, which is far beyond what's realistically crackable by brute force with current technology.
In other words, a long password made of ordinary lowercase letters is often stronger than a short password stuffed with symbols and substitutions. Length beats cleverness.
Why true randomness matters
The second ingredient is genuine randomness. Humans are bad at generating random-feeling passwords — we gravitate toward patterns, keyboard walks (like "qwerty123"), and personal references (birthdays, pet names) that feel random to us but are actually highly predictable to an attacker's cracking software, which is trained on exactly these patterns.
A password generator that draws from a cryptographically secure random source avoids this entirely. Every character is chosen independently with no underlying pattern, which is precisely what makes brute-force guessing infeasible.
What a good password generator should do
1. Use a cryptographic random source (like the Web Crypto API in a browser), not a simple pseudo-random function that could theoretically be predicted. 2. Let you set a meaningful length — 16 characters as a reasonable minimum, 20+ for anything important like a primary email or financial account. 3. Include a mix of character sets — lowercase, uppercase, digits and symbols — and guarantee at least one of each so the password meets typical site requirements. 4. Never transmit or log the generated password anywhere. A password generated in your browser and never sent over the network is inherently safer than one generated by a server you have to trust.
The part most people skip: using a password manager
Generating a strong password solves half the problem. The other half is not reusing it. A password manager lets you use a different, fully random, long password for every single account without having to remember any of them — you only need to remember one master password. This is genuinely the single biggest security improvement most people can make, and it's what makes long random passwords practical to use everywhere rather than just for your most important accounts.