Inspiration: As a team of two, we both realized how frustrating it is to create strong passwords that meet security standards without being a hassle to remember. During a cybersecurity lecture, we discussed how people often overlook password strength and reuse passwords, which puts their data at risk. That inspired us to build something practical—a tool that not only evaluates password strength but also gives detailed feedback and generates secure passwords based on user preferences. Our goal was to help users, especially fellow students, create stronger passwords easily and learn more about security along the way.
How We Built It: We started by outlining what makes a password strong: length, diversity of characters, and randomness. From there, we built a system that evaluates passwords across these criteria, giving a score and strength level (like "Moderate" or "Very Strong") based on the password's complexity. To make the tool more practical, we added personalized recommendations and a feature to generate strong passwords based on user inputs (length, use of numbers, special characters, etc.). We also added password history tracking, so users can avoid reusing old passwords—something we’ve both been guilty of! To ensure the tool was user-friendly, we designed a simple command-line interface that guides users through the process.
Challenges: One of the biggest challenges was understanding how entropy works and then translating that into a user-friendly metric. Calculating entropy involved some advanced math, and explaining it in a way that makes sense to non-technical users required trial and error.
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