password quality meter?
 

Hi folks,

Some of the Mozilla and Netscape software have a password quality meter built in. I read up on creating strong passwords recently and found it to be a great idea. I used Thunderbird's quality meter to test out a new password for a Unix account (I was surprised to find out that they had altered the policy to go back to 8-character passwords.)

My question is, does anybody know of a program that is made for checking the resistance of passwords against brute-force attacks? This seems like such a useful idea that I'd be surprised if there isn't a dedicated program available.

Cheers

cracklib should do that for you :)

Edit: actually no it won't, but searching for a program that uses it to test password strength might provide something useful. Here is something else that might be what you're after.

Thanks for the link. Not quite what I had in mind, but looks like it might do the job. I was thinking of something that specifically shows you an indication of how strong the password is as you type it in, so you can try passwords and password patterns out. Looks like the Ripper website calls this "proactive password strength checking".