OS X Yosemite: The Missing Manual

The Password Assistant

Plenty of software features require you to make up a password: Web sites, accounts, networked disks, and so on. No wonder most people wind up trying to use the same password in as many situations as possible. Worse, they use something easily guessable like their names, kids’ names, spouse’s names, and so on. Even regular English words aren’t very secure, because hackers routinely use dictionary attacks—software that tries to guess your password by running through every word in the dictionary—to break in.

To prevent evildoers from guessing your passwords, OS X comes with a good-password suggestion feature called the Password Assistant (Figure 13-16). It cheerfully generates one suggestion after another for impossible-to-guess passwords (recharges8@exchangeability, anyone?).

Figure 13-16. Anyplace you’re supposed to make up a password, including in the Users & Groups pane of System Preferences, a key icon appears. When you click it, the Password Assistant opens. Use the pop-up menu and the Length slider to specify how long and unguessable the password should be. The Quality graph shows you just how tough it is to crack this password. (In the Type pop-up menu, you might wonder about FIPS-181. It stands for the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 181, which sets forth the U.S. government’s standard for password-generating algorithms.)

Fortunately, ...