Using a password manager is not merely convenient, it’s an effective way to adopt better security practices without too much stress. It basically sums up to: 1) never re-use the same password, 2) use strong passwords.

But could you gauge the strength of your passwords? Can you easily determine how much entropy they contain? Since entropy is a measure for randomness, it can only be estimated and it’s usually a quite complex process.

Luckily Clipperz online password manager now provides visual indicators that will help you to quickly asses the strength of you passwords. Thanks to these indicators you can spot weak passwords and substitute them with strong ones.

In the screenshot above, please note the color of last one of the asterisks masking your passwords: it’s bright green! This means that the password underneath is very strong. For extremely weak passwords the last asterisk would be a vivid red, while adding more complexity and randomness the color will gradually shift to orange, gold, dark green, … (see samples below)

When in editing mode, the visual indicator change to a thin colored bar right below each password fields. The bar length and color will dynamically change accordingly to the strength of the password. Adding more characters and/or selecting them from multiple sets (lowercase letters, capital letters, numbers, punctuation, different alphabets, ….) will increase the length and shift the color toward green.

The same bar is displayed under the passphrase field when logging in to Clipperz. If your passphrase is short and simple the entire security chain of Clipperz is weakened and your data could not be protected against serious attackers. In that case it’s highly recommended to change immediately your passphrase.

To learn more about password strength, read our Passphrase FAQ or this Wikipedia entry.