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Home » Archive » 2004 » September » 06 » Password generator bookmarklet

Nic's bookmarklet pops up a JavaScript prompt box asking for your "master" password, then MD5s it against the domain of the current login page and inserts the resulting hash in to any password fields on the page. A single password can be used for dozens of sites without any risk of a compromise of one account affecting the others. It's brilliant.

Here's the bookmarklet. Even if the login URL does change you can just have your password either reset or sent to you by the site and then set the new password using this script. Unfortunately, some login pages change all the time. I'm pretty sure Amazon's works this way.

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Comments

Nic Wolff (http://angel.net/~nic) wrote:

Hi - thanks for your interest in the passwdlet. Just to clarify, it uses only the hostname from the current URL to hash with your master password, not the whole URL - it'll work fine at Amazon.

∴ Nic Wolff | 16-Sep-2004 9:34pm est | http://angel.net/~nic | #5601

Keith (http://keithdevens.com/) wrote:

Ooh, sexy. Thanks Nic!

∴ Keith | 16-Sep-2004 9:37pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #5602

dilvie (http://www.dilvie.com/) wrote:

That's a really cool concept. There are a few obvious problems with it, though:

- A lot of the most important passwords (ie, online banking) have very specific password rules that an MD5 sum will not work for.

- Often, there will be one password that spans multiple domains (ie, a network of related websites all sharing the same login database).

I threw together a password tool that can generate passwords that would work for those conditions. It generates word-like passwords that are (sometimes) easy to remember or type.

∴ dilvie | 9-Dec-2004 6:22pm est | http://www.dilvie.com/ | #6560

Chris (http://chris.zarate.org/) wrote:

Here's a version of Nic's script that will ignore subdomains--very useful for those sites that have multiple login points.

http://labs.zarate.org/passwd/

∴ Chris | 4-May-2005 2:21pm est | http://chris.zarate.org/ | #7588

Keith Gaughan (http://talideon.com/) wrote:

So what about a domain like bbc.co.uk, or yahoo.com.au?

∴ Keith Gaughan | 5-May-2005 12:09pm est | http://talideon.com/ | #7594

Chris (http://chris.zarate.org/) wrote:

Keith, it briefly didn't support those URLs, but now does, and has for a few days.

∴ Chris | 9-May-2005 12:22pm est | http://chris.zarate.org/ | #7620

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