To increase the safety of your users account, you can force them to use passwords of a minimum length, minimum strength and even force them to exclude certain words from their passwords (like your site name, the topic your site refers to, etc.).
But the other side of the equation, is no matter how secure the password is, if it has been compromised not password strength estimator will help make it better. As such NIST has the following guidance: check passwords against those obtained from previous data breaches. Pwned Password integration does that.
zxcvbn Readme said:
zxcvbn is a password strength estimator inspired by password crackers. Through pattern matching and conservative entropy calculations, it recognizes and weighs 10k common passwords, common names and surnames according to US census data, popular English words, and other common patterns like dates, repeats (aaa), sequences (abcd), keyboard patterns (qwertyuiop), and l33t speak.
Consider using zxcvbn as an algorithmic alternative to password policy — it is more secure, flexible, and usable when sites require a minimal complexity score in place of annoying rules like "passwords must contain three of {lower, upper, numbers, symbols}".
Features
- Show password feature, allow users to toggle to see what they have actually entered.
- Show users how strong their passwords really are when it comes to crack-attempts
- Deliver instant feedback if password and password-confirm match and/or certain requirements are not met
- Force users to choose passwords with a minimum strength
- Force users to choose passwords with a minimum length
- Force users to chooce a password not containing words from a blacklist you define
- No cheating: This modification also controls users passwords on server side with Ben Jeavos php-implementation of zxcvbn.
- Easy styling through XenForo Style Properties
