Password Generator

Just wanted to fulfill my contractual duties as a blogger by commenting on anything neat that I find on the web (mostly of the technical persuasion) and linking to it.

In this case the interesting thing is a little password generator using javascript.

Demo of usage
(http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/singleSignOn.html)
Actual site
(http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.html)

I find this very interesting for a number of reasons.

1) It is a simple solution to a difficult problem.

2) It is actually very elegant once you think about it.
- Obviously it allows you to have one password
- It creates an environment where that password is never stored anywhere
- Even if someone knows one of the passwords output by the generator they would have a very difficult (potentially impossible) time reverse engineering the password to get the master password. I believe the fact that it is RSA will prevent someone from ever reverse engineering it, but I could be wrong.

3) You could run this javascript via a bookmarklet (locally for convenience) or off of any web server. Again, assuming the server is a trusted source, there is no chance of the master password being compromised accidentally because it is never stored. Of course if the server is malicious in its intent it could capture the master password you enter and store it without you knowing it. If you set up your own server with the code though, this won't be a problem.

Very interesting stuff.