This seems like one picked up data packet away from being a bad idea. Am I overthinking this?
This is probably fine. The connection to DDG will be over HTTPS, so a captured packet would need to be decoded first. And if someone were to manage to break the encryption, then they would also need to know what service you used the password for.
Ultimately, it’s more secure to generate locally, but it would be a huge amount of work to get anything usable out of a packet capture
I’m no cybersecurity expert. But couldn’t they just sniff your traffic to see where you (your packets) go and test the pw on each login for the last hour?
edit: I guess they are using DuckDuckGo, which has a higher level of privacy design and limits.
With https as protocol, picked up data packets won’t do much harm.
But relying on anything but a local password manager is imho still a bad idea.This is probably ok. First of all, they’re probably actually doing it in Javascript in the browser. It probably never travels over the network at all. And, if it did, with HTTPS it would be hard to intercept and decrypt except by a government or something.
But, it still gives me the willies to generate a password on a web page. Fundamentally a web browser is still a tool for sending and receiving data over the Internet, and that’s not the kind of tool I’d want to be generating something that I don’t want other people to know or see.
What happens if there’s a bug? If the password is being generated in an app on my local system a badly designed app with a bug could maybe log my newly generated password in a local log file somewhere. If there’s a bug in DuckDuckGo’s javascript, who knows where that newly generated password might be logged?
hunter2
correct horse battery staple
Your password manager does this too!
I would definitely use those passwords! /s
$ Openssl rand 16 | base64
today I learned. Thanks :)
$ pwgen -s -1 32
Or just use a locally hosted password generator for one that isn’t handfed to you by a for-profit company…
Short password please.
-“Penis”
pass --generate -c