Many of us remember reading about the term “entropy” from the school physics book or the thermodynamics book in the university. But entropy is also a concept in cryptography – the part of information technology that deals in encryption and decryption of data. If you want to know about various ciphers and hashing algorithms then you have to sign up for a course in cryptography at your local university.
Entropy of a passphrase, password or any other data can tell you whether there is a identifiable pattern in that data or it is totally random. A password that does not follow any pattern and is created randomly has more entropy and is considered to be very strong. You can check the entropy of a passphrase or password to determine how strong it is using the free “Strong Passwords Need Entropy (SPNE)” tool.
For each of your passwords, SPNE displays the complete character analysis – how many characters have been used, how many characters have been repeated and how many times they have been repeated. It displays the entropy level in bits, maximum number of trials needed to crack the password, how much time will it take to crack the password, etc. You can also choose the cracking speed (iterations per second) of the computer used to crack the password. It also displays whether your password is present in the 10,000 worst passwords list.
SPNE comes with a strong password generator that is able to generate a number of different strings, for example, it can generate GUID, WPA2 key, MAC address, Morse code, pronounceable words, random strings and more. It follows 16 different rules to ensure that passwords are very strong, such as, choosing password with an entropy over 100 only.
You can download “Strong Passwords Need Entropy (SPNE)” tool from https://protosoftware.blog4ever.com/strong-passwords-need-entropy-spne-12-may-2013.