Password Generator: Create Strong, Random Passwords in Your Browser

Everyone knows they're supposed to use a unique, strong password for every account, and almost nobody actually does, because remembering dozens of random strings is genuinely hard. The usual fix is a password manager plus a random password generator, but here's the uncomfortable part most people skip over: if you generate your new bank password on a website, and that website's server is the one computing the "random" value, you're trusting a stranger's code with the exact string you're about to use to protect your money.

That should never be the model for password generation. A password generator's entire job is to produce a value nobody else should ever see, including the tool that made it.

Why password generation has to be client-side, no exceptions

If a password is generated on a server and sent to you, there's no way to independently verify it wasn't logged, cached, or observed in transit, even over HTTPS, before it reached your browser. The only way to eliminate that risk entirely is to generate the password using your browser's own cryptographically secure random number generator (crypto.getRandomValues), so the value exists only on your device from the moment it's created. This isn't a nice-to-have for a password tool, it's the baseline requirement. Any password generator that doesn't work this way is asking for trust it has no way to earn.

How to generate a strong password with ihatetools

1. Open the Password Generator tool.
2. Set your desired length. Longer is better: aim for at least 16 characters for most accounts, more for anything protecting financial or sensitive data.
3. Choose which character sets to include: uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols. Including all four maximizes entropy per character.
4. Generate the password. It's created instantly using your browser's built-in cryptographic randomness, not a counter or a server call.
5. Copy it directly into your password manager. Don't reuse it, and don't write it down somewhere unencrypted.

Because generation happens instantly and locally, you can generate a fresh password for every single account without any delay, there's no reason to ever reuse one "because generating a new one is annoying."

Understanding password entropy (and why it actually matters)

Entropy measures how many guesses an attacker would need, on average, to find your password through brute force. It depends on two things: the size of the character pool (uppercase + lowercase + numbers + symbols gives roughly 94 possible characters) and the length of the password. Doubling the character pool size adds a fixed amount of entropy per character, but adding length compounds: a 20-character password from a 94-character set has vastly more entropy than a 12-character password from the same set, far more than switching a few letters to symbols would add on its own.

Practical guidance that actually holds up:

• Length beats complexity tricks. A long, fully random password beats a shorter one with forced "l33t-speak" substitutions, which are predictable to crackers anyway.
• Never reuse passwords across accounts. If one site has a breach, a reused password lets attackers walk into every other account that shares it. This is the single biggest real-world cause of account takeovers, far more than weak individual passwords.
• Use a password manager, not memory. The entire point of random generation is that you don't need to remember it; a manager stores it and autofills it, so there's no incentive to pick something memorable (and therefore weaker).
• Symbols help, but length is still the bigger lever. If a site restricts symbols, compensate by increasing length rather than worrying about the missing character set.

FAQ

How long should my password be?

At least 16 characters for most accounts, and 20 or more for anything high-value, like a password manager's master password or financial accounts. Length is the single biggest factor in resisting brute-force attacks.

Is a browser-generated password actually random?

Yes, when it uses the Web Crypto API's crypto.getRandomValues, which is a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator built into every modern browser, the same category of randomness used for cryptographic keys, not a simple Math.random() call.

Should I include symbols in every password?

Include them when the site allows it, since they increase the character pool and therefore the entropy per character. If a site restricts symbols or has an unusually short maximum length, prioritize using the maximum allowed length instead.

Can I reuse a strong password across multiple accounts if it's long enough?

No. Strength and reuse are separate problems. A sufficiently strong password still fails you entirely if it's exposed in one breach and reused everywhere else. Generate a unique password per account regardless of strength.

Generate a password you can actually trust

A password that exists even briefly outside your own browser is a password with a weaker guarantee than it needs to have. Open the Password Generator on ihatetools and create strong, unique passwords that are never sent anywhere, for every account you own. If you also need to verify file integrity or create unique identifiers alongside your credentials, check out the Hash Generator and UUID Generator too.