Password Difficulty

Inspiration

I've been learning Java since middle school, and I've been going over cybersecurity since freshman year. This past summer I was enrolled in the University Pre-Freshmen Engineering Program (UPREP) taking a Computer Science course over Java. So coming here I thought about how many programs are there to guess a persons' password, but none to make a more secure password.

What it does

The program takes a password, passphrase, or a simple word and then finds the most common letters (vowels) and a random letter in that phrase and replaces it with an uncommon letter and symbols. It then adds a segment of letters to the end of the password

How I built it

I used Netbeans Java to make a method that replaces vowels and a few other common letters with four other characters chosen using a random generator. I also used a random generator to select a random character out from the password given to be replaced by a character.

Challenges I ran into

In order for this code to operate I needed an array of characters to be called to check and run through a string, however when I returned a char from the method that required a char it would run through so I had to go back and re-write each method and array to char and string in a way that the password is read as a string (so that I can read through it using charAt() ) The next issue was that my code was only taking the last character entered into as a password and repeating that character to the length of the password and it being random, that was due to the fact that I had an extra for loop, technically causing an exception that I had actually built my entire code around which also made me go back and re-write the code.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm really proud that I completed my code to the degree that I wanted to. last year I "finished" my game, but I wasn't satisfied because there was a lot more that I wanted to implement, but didn't have the time or knowledge to do so. This year, however, I did everything I wanted to do with this code, I might even make an HTML page after the competition and post it online so that people can use the code.

What I learned

1) Always check your for loops and that you are calling the correct variable inside that loop and that it is iterating properly through loops. 2)Check you "==" for if statements when involving strings and chars as they both have different equal variables.

What's next for Password Difficulty

Implementing a new method that will check for two characters that are the same next to each other (Password) and then changing both to a variable that will be randomized and then adding a system to save that password for future use and easy access.

Built With

• java
• netbeans