Password Generator

Generate strong random passwords with a Cisco-compatible mode.

Input

16

Output

Strength: Entropy: bits

Generating secure passwords for Cisco devices

Password strength is measured in entropy — the number of bits of randomness an attacker must guess. A 16-character password drawn from 94 printable ASCII characters has approximately 105 bits of entropy (log2(9416)), making an exhaustive brute-force attack computationally infeasible with current hardware. By contrast, a common 8-character dictionary word has fewer than 20 bits of effective entropy — trivially cracked in seconds.

Cisco IOS and IOS-XE support several password storage types. Type 0 stores the password in plaintext — never acceptable in production. Type 7 uses a reversible XOR cipher; it provides no real security and should be treated as plaintext. The correct choice is Type 5 (enable secret), which stores an MD5-based hash, or the more modern Type 8 (PBKDF2-SHA256) and Type 9 (scrypt) introduced in IOS 15.3 and IOS-XE 16.x respectively. Always prefer enable secret over enable password.

The Cisco-compatible mode in this generator removes characters that IOS parses ambiguously: the question mark (?) triggers help mode in the CLI, double quotes break certain config parsers, and dollar signs interfere with TCL scripting. Enabling this filter still leaves a charset of around 88 characters — more than sufficient entropy at lengths of 12 characters and above.

This Cisco password generator uses crypto.getRandomValues(), the browser's cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator (CSPRNG), ensuring that the output is unpredictable regardless of how long the page has been open. The generated password and its ready-to-paste enable secret and username secret commands never leave your browser. When you have a password, use the Config Generator to embed it directly in a full device configuration.

Common use cases

  • Device hardening — generate strong enable secret credentials before deploying a new router or switch.
  • Lab builds — produce unique passwords for each device in a multi-node GNS3 or EVE-NG topology.
  • Password rotation — replace aging Type 7 passwords across your fleet with entropy-verified credentials.
  • CCNA / CCNP studies — understand the difference between password types while generating exam-ready commands.
  • VTY and console access — generate credentials for SSH lines that meet organisational complexity requirements.

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