Patent ID: 8108685

Claim:
A method for displaying information about password quality to a user as the user is entering a password, comprising: receiving a substring of the password which includes one or more characters of the password that have been received from the user; dynamically determining a quality of the substring of the password as the characters are being received, wherein the quality of the substring of the password is a measure of the susceptibility of the substring of the password to being cracked; and dynamically updating a quality meter being displayed to the user, wherein the quality meter displays the quality of the substring of the password as the characters are being received from the user so that the user can dynamically improve the quality of the substring of the password as the user is entering characters for the password; wherein determining the quality of the substring involves determining sz N to determine a number of passwords which can be formed using up to N characters and using a character set with size sz, wherein sz is a number of characters in a character set for the substring, and N is a length of the substring.