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Password generator designed by Cal Poly professor creates secure combos that are easy to remember

Flickr member Liz Foreman

Statistics show the most Americans are extremely lazy when it comes to creating secure, unique passwords. According to SplashData's annual list for 2014, these are the five most popular passwords found on the Internet:

  1. 12345
  2. password
  3. 12345678
  4. qwerty
  5. abc123

Easy-to-break passwords like these—and many other variations—are a weak link in your overall web security.
Bring up the issue of computer passwords in just about any setting, and you’re likely to hear a variety of complaints, suggestions and security issues. Passwords—like them or not—have become a very regular part of our everyday lives.

Hoping to ease this burden and bring an increased level of security, Cal Poly Computer Science Professor John Clements has developed a way to randomly generate very secure passwords, simply by using any large piece of work—fiction or not.

His random password generator is based on the Markov Model and uses Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities as a basis for the letter patterns.