document: A convenient method for securely managing passwords Computer users are asked to generate , keep secret , and recall an increasing number of passwords for uses including host accounts , email servers , e-commerce sites , and online financial services . Unfortunately , the password entropy that users can comfortably memorize seems insufficient to store unique , secure passwords for all these accounts , and it is likely to remain constant as the number of passwords ( and the adversary 's computational power ) increases into the future . In this paper , we propose a technique that uses a strengthened cryptographic hash function to compute secure passwords for arbitrarily many accounts while requiring the user to memorize only a single short password . This mechanism functions entirely on the client ; no server-side changes are needed . Unlike previous approaches , our design is both highly resistant to brute force attacks and nearly stateless , allowing users to retrieve their passwords from any location so long as they can execute our program and remember a short secret . This combination of security and convenience will , we believe , entice users to adopt our scheme . We discuss the construction of our algorithm in detail , compare its strengths and weaknesses to those of related approaches , and present Password Multiplier , an implementation in the form of an extension to the Mozilla Firefox web browser .
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