Coming up with unique passwords all the time can be a struggle with you’re supposed to be doing a hundred and one other things. If only Siri, your in-phone digital assistant, could help. Fortunately, it can. As you may already know, Siri takes many of its answers from the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, and that includes generating random passwords.
There are several password-generating-apps on iOS – search iTunes for “password generator”. My personal recommendation would be LastPass as this gives management and secure notes, in addition to password generation.
However, if you only want a simple solution there’s no need to install anything. Simple say to Siri, “random password” or “generate password” (both work) and it will come back to you with a password, accompanied by many more details from Wolfram Alpha.
You’ll find that the password is translated into a phonetic alphabet; e.g. “sierra” for s, “foxtrot” for f, etc. Below that Siri, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha, provides a group of additional passwords.
If you’re wondering how strong your password is, the next section gives details on how long it would take to break the password (i.e. enumerate), how many passwords exist within the length and character set used, and how much entropy the password has. Science alert – Entropy is a measure of chaos. The password’s strength is judged by how chaotic (i.e. random) it is.
If after looking at the password’s statistics, you decide you want more strength, scrolling down a little further will reveal more passwords made from larger sets of characters. The more characters a password might have makes it even harder to guess.
After all of that, if you want an even stronger password (really?!), you can make Siri give you an even longer password than the default eight characters. For example if you want a 16 character password, just say “Random password 16 characters”, and Siri will comply. As you do, note how the entropy value increases.
Obviously you can give Siri any number for a password length – in my somewhat pedantic testing I found that the limit of characters was 300. Far more than you’d ever want to enter into your Facebook account!
The great problem with this method is that there’s no way to copy and paste the generated passwords from Siri’s output into your applications. This means you’ll need to write down or memorize the password which isn’t all that convenient. It’s with that in mind that we recommend you stick with something like LastPass.
Credit to OSXDaily for this Siri tip.
