Security Tools

Two things a system administrator ends up doing constantly: creating a credential that will not be guessed, and proving a file is the file it claims to be. Neither deserves a desktop install or an account somewhere.

Both tools below run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, which is the only acceptable arrangement for a password you are about to use and for a file you may not be allowed to upload anywhere.

Tools in this category

  • Secure Password Generator — generate passwords and passphrases with control over length, character sets and ambiguous characters, with an entropy estimate for each result.
  • Hash generator — compute MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512 for text, and compare a result against a published checksum.

Where these get used

The hash generator earns its place after a download. A vendor publishes a SHA-256 next to an ISO or an installer; you compute the hash of what actually landed on disk and compare. A mismatch means a corrupted transfer far more often than it means tampering, but either way you find out before you deploy it to fifty machines.

The password generator matters most for accounts nobody will type by hand: service accounts, local administrator passwords, API keys, a break-glass credential going straight into a vault. Length beats complexity rules there, and the entropy figure is the honest measure of how long a password would hold up.

Email authentication checks

Two more checks are security work even though they live with the DNS tools, because a domain that anyone can spoof is a security problem, not a naming one:

  • SPF record validator — confirm which hosts may send as your domain, and catch the ten-lookup limit that silently breaks SPF.
  • DMARC record validator — read the published policy and see whether a failing message is monitored, quarantined or rejected.

Related guides


Other tool categories