When registering accounts on websites or within online applications (messengers, game clients, banking applications), setting up a secure Wi-Fi network, and in many other cases, you need to create a password. You can come up with it yourself or use special password generators. The latter will help create a complex passphrase, which will be almost impossible for attackers to crack using automatic hacking (password guessing) methods.
How to Save Passwords on Mac?
For Mac operating systems, many applications have been developed that allow you to generate passwords of varying degrees of complexity, depending on user settings. There are both highly specialized utilities created exclusively for generating passphrases and more advanced programs that can not only generate but store user passwords in encrypted form on a computer or even on a remote server.
For a list of the best Mac password storage programs, see the article below:
- AZPassword is one of the simplest yet most effective programs for generating strong passwords. The application is distributed free of charge, its interface is made in many languages.
The advantage of the AZPassword utility is that to use it, the user needs to make a couple of clicks with the mouse – and the program will generate from 1 to 50 passwords from 5 to 30 characters long. But this is not all of its capabilities.
As you can see from the image, to generate passwords, the user just needs to set the length and number of password phrases (if several are required) using the appropriate sliders, and also specify the types of characters that will be used in the generated password.
- Free and easy-to-use Random Password Generator by IObit allows you to create passwords from 6 to 64 characters long. Passphrases can consist of uppercase and lowercase Latin letters, numbers, and various punctuation marks. The user can use all the listed types of characters or some of them (minimum – 1) in the password.
Random Password Generator allows you to store passphrases on your local computer. For the convenience of the subsequent search for the desired password, it is possible to add a text identifier (ID) and/or a note to it (you can specify, for example, the address of the site for which the password was generated).
To enter the program itself, you also need a master key (the dialog box for its creation opens when you first start the program) – without it, you cannot get access to the passwords stored in the IObit Random Password Generator program.
Why Is It Unsafe to Store Passwords in Browsers?
All modern browsers have a function for storing user logins and passwords entered into authorization forms on various sites. Undoubtedly, this is convenient. I entered the password once, gave the browser consent to save it, and now all subsequent logins to the site will not require manual entry of authorization data. But is it really that safe? Let’s try to figure it out.
But even if you activate encryption of the file with passwords, the risk of their leakage to third parties still remains. That’s why:
- When a user uses the autofill option for authorization forms, the browser asks for a master key, without which it will be impossible to access the passwords.
- After successfully entering this key, the password database remains unlocked (for some time or until the browser is closed).
- Now anyone who sits at a computer can easily enter the browser settings and export all passwords from there.