But how do you know if your password is strong enough? Head to The Password Meter, a free service that rates the strength of your password based on a number of criteria.

According to a series of tests, a number of password security meters fail to identify passwords that are susceptible to cracking.

The Password Meter web utility tests the strength of your passwords as you type them, scoring your password strength based on a number of positive and negative password attributes.

Specifically, researchers at Concordia University in Montreal found that the same password will often yield inconsistent results across varying password strength meters on different websites.

But according to Mark Stockley at Naked Security, password strength meters have pretty much stayed the same. Last March, Stockley tested five popular password strength meters and they all failed.

If you’ve ever made an online account, then you’ve come across a password strength meter—that little thing that encourages you to add a little more complexity to your credentials. And, if ...

The password meters presented to the test subjects used "zero-order entropy," a technique many meters use to measure password strength.

For instance, some password strength checkers consider any password with more than X number of characters to be strong, even if they are the same character repeated over-and-over again, or even if the ...

Password strength meters that offer web surfers a visual gauge of how weak or strong a chosen lock may be are increasingly present on websites – but how effective are they at getting folks to choose ...

Website password strength meters, like a spouse asked to assess your haircut or outfit, often tell you only what you want to hear. That’s the finding from researchers at Concordia University in ...

New research exposes the weakness of password strength meters, and shows consumers should remain skeptical when the bar turns green in order to create strong passwords.