What makes a password generator “Cryptographic Quality”?
Without a cryptographic quality password generator, the passwords you generate may look strong, but are actually very weak. It’s a trap many folks have fallen into simply because many shareware authors have little knowledge of cryptography. Modern programming languages include random number generators, that given an initial number (seed), will generate a sequence of pseudo-random numbers. There are several problems with using these built-in random number generators for cryptographic purposes, but that’s what many shareware authors use without understanding the risks. First, the sequence of numbers produced by commonly used random number generators may not be as random as they appear and may contain predictable patterns. In fact, documentation provided with software compilers often states that the built-in random functions should not be used for cryptographic purposes. Second, the seed value which initializes the pseudo-random generator is most often a 32-bit integer, and thus, the gene
