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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

See also SuperGenPass (http://supergenpass.com/) and YPassword (http://ypassword.espozito.com/)

I like this approach. It doesn't require anything to be stored on your machine, thus you don't need to worry about backing up or syncing a password database, and you can login from anywhere.

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Funny how people laugh at LinkedIn for using SHA-1 and then recommend using password generators that use one iteration of MD5 of master password.

Yes, as @tlrobinson suggested me, I should use bcrypt instead of SHA1. At the time I created ypassword there weren't any bcrypt js code. There is one now, and this will be my next update.

In fact, I tried to port scrypt to js once. Reading the article about scrypt it felt not so hard to achieve. But I was afraid to introduce implementation error because some parameter aren't specified as clearly as I would have liked in the article.

And http://passwordmaker.org/ (website down right now?) which I think supports more platforms than either of those. I use the Firefox/Chrome extensions and one of the [not so great] Android apps

I'm definitely an advocate of password generators rather than managers

It worries me that they seem to by implying that, e.g., MD5 and SHA-1 are impossible to reverse, when my understanding is that that isn't the case.

"Do not reveal anything about the input that was used to generate it" seems to be too strong a claim, though I hope someone will tell me differently.

Edit: Never mind, I see that you clarified what technology they use further down.

No hash is impossible to reverse but I think the strength of these systems is that the final password isn't something you need to remember. It can be as long and as complex as the website allows. Even weak hash functions like SHA-1 are unrealistic to reverse when the search space is big enough, i.e. enough characters

Well, the relevant search space when reversing a hash is the space of original passwords, and you do have to remember your master password. The attack to worry about with these systems is a website taking your generated password and maliciously reversing it to reveal your master password, not that someone will steal your hashed password from a database where it'll have been hashed again and stored securely, and then reverse it twice to reveal your original master password.

Their FAQ seems to say that they salt with other data before hashing, so they should at least be safe from precomputed lookup tables. I don't know how feasible it'd be to crack a hashed, salted password, but they'd probably be better off using blowfish or one of the other algorithms from the "Storing Passwords Securely" article which is now on the front page [1].

And I'm not sure why they mention using l33t-speak to protect your password from being reversed. That's just bizarre. The information on their website makes me worry that they may not know what they're doing, though maybe I'm just misinterpreting it.

[1] http://throwingfire.com/storing-passwords-securely/?utm_sour...

It constantly amazes me that SuperGenPass hasn't caught on more. I don't use it for critical stuff (finance and email), but it provides a decent level of security for the less important stuff.

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