🤩 Announcing: PrivacySafe Bot - Easily Create Secure Passwords
PrivacySafe Bot is the latest of our privacy tools to add to your belt
🔐 Your Simple App for Strong Passwords
You get that dreaded message: a cybercriminal has spent a bunch of your Starbucks Bucks at a far-away market in Braavos. How did they get into your account?
Well, of course they got into your account! It’s “qwerty1993” and you haven’t changed it since high school. Now you have to go through *all* your accounts and create new passwords, and you’ve got to make sure they follow the password rules for each website.
Now, there’s an app for that — PrivacySafe Bot is a secure, private tool for generating strong passwords and memorable passphrases that runs in any web browser.
Your secrets are created entirely on your device using a cryptographically strong random number generator. No data is copied, transmitted, or stored on any server.
Sure, there are plenty of third-party services that will generate and store complex passwords in the “cloud” or in a keyring on your computer. PrivacySafe Bot fills an important gap: you need quick, quality passwords and you want to be able to customize them without compromising security. Now you can do just that, without worrying there’s a copy floating in the cloud.
PrivacySafe Bot will tell you whether your customizations have made passwords or passphrases weak and you can see in real-time how to make them stronger.
A simple slider and a few checkboxes gives you all the choices you need, with live and informative feedback from the app. And, like all of PrivacySafe’s tools, it’s 100% Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that can be checked by security researchers and amateurs alike. ☑️
🤔 What Makes a Strong Password, Anyway?
Choosing a long password of at least 16 characters is the single best way to increase security. You also want to increase the complexity by adding a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers. This increases the “keyspace” which makes a password much harder to crack.
Lucky for you, PrivacySafe Bot does that for you.
Keyspace is a geeky word that refers to the total number of possible passwords that can be generated given a set of characters and a specific password length. For example:
If you choose letters from the lowercase English alphabet (26 characters) and your password is 12 characters long, the keyspace is 26¹² and not very strong.
If you also include uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols (let’s say 95 total characters to choose from), the keyspace grows to 95¹² even though the password is still 12 characters long.
A larger keyspace makes passwords harder to guess or brute-force because there are more possible combinations an attacker must try.
PrivacySafe Bot keeps your user experience simple. We could, of course, add in the many thousands of available Unicode characters outside of an English-language keyboard. Some folks even use emojis to make their passwords complex.
However, we strive to deliver tools that can reach a wide audience and don’t want to give anyone a headache. PrivacySafe Bot gives you the simplest set of choices necessary to achieve your security goals. 💯
🤔 What the Heck Is a Passphrase?
A passphrase is a password that is longer and made up of multiple words, making it easier to remember and, in many cases, more secure. Instead of a short, complex password like “Xg$7p!zQ” a passphrase might be something like “correct horse battery staple” that can be remembered by humans, not just computers.
In general, we recommend you create and use passphrases wherever you can. Passphrases are not the default in PrivacySafe Bot, however, because most non-geeks don’t know what they are.
Using well-known English phrases like “the early bird catches the worm” as passphrases can be risky because attackers use dictionary attacks that include common and repeating word combinations. We know all about these types of attacks because, well, we’ve taught them before in ethical hacking classes.
You should also avoid song lyrics, movie quotes, and phrases from books like “big brother is watching” — as artificial intelligence gets better and better, even combinations that seem obscure to us humans will be possible to guess.
PrivacySafe Bot solves this problem by grabbing random English words from a list of thousands provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This keeps your passphrases strong and takes humans out of the process, so that it’s nearly impossible for your passphrases to be found in common usage.
❤️ Consider upgrading or gifting a paid subscription. Share the accessible version.
Passphrases are generally recommended for device and storage protection, like full-disk encryption on your laptop or phone. The large number of possible combinations makes it much harder to crack, even if someone gets a hold of your device and has special tools, supercomputers, and a lot of time to break the encryption.
This is why you often see long mnemonic phrases securing cryptocurrency, like wallets for Bitcoin or Monero. Expect to see increased usage of long combinations of random words as time goes on and the methods that secure crypto assets become more common.
🛡️ The Bottom Line: Stronger Security Starts Small
Whatever your level of expertise, you deserve privacy, security, and peace of mind. Where it makes sense to use a password, use a password — but make it long and complex. Where it makes sense to use a passphrase, use a passphrase — but make sure it’s long and random.
Whether you’re on-the-go and just need quick and trustworthy credentials, or you’re generating a list of passphrases to beef up your cybersecurity after a data breach, PrivacySafe Bot is a simple and useful tool to add to your privacy arsenal. 💪
🙏 Thank You For Reading!
Join PrivacySafe Social to keep up with our latest news and releases. We’ve got more public apps fresh out of the oven and you’ll be the first folks who get a taste as we announce them.
🌍 Find Us Around the Web
We’re getting our message out on:
🌞 PrivacySafe Social: @bitsontape
• Telegram: Bits On Tape
• Blue Sky: @bitsontape.com
• Twitter X: @BitsOnTape
• LinkedIn: Bits On Tape
© Ivy Cyber Consulting LLC. This project is dedicated to ethical Free and Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware. Ivy Cyber™ and Bits On Tape™ are pending trademarks and PrivacySafe® is a registered trademark. All content, unless otherwise noted, is licensed Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International. Xkcd comic is CC BY-NC by Randall Munroe.