this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
68 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

47653 readers
512 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

LLM-generated passwords (generated directly by the LLM, rather than by an agent using a tool) appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure, because LLMs are designed to predict tokens – the opposite of securely and uniformly sampling random characters.

top 17 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] guy@piefed.social 17 points 5 hours ago

Welp, that's another thing I hadn't thought you could use llms for and another thing I would never do

[–] markz@suppo.fi 52 points 9 hours ago (6 children)

Don't tell me people are using llms to generate passwords

[–] fiatcode@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

I know someone who generate passwords in AI chat

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Even where they aren't, I bet this is something that could end up happening when using them as open-ended agents that might try making their own accounts. The article also mentions this:

Furthermore, with the recent surge in popularity of coding agents and vibe-coding tools, people are increasingly developing software without looking at the code. We’ve seen that these coding agents are prone to using LLM-generated passwords without the developer’s knowledge or choice. When users don’t review the agent actions or the resulting source code, this “vibe-password-generation” is easy to miss.

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 37 points 9 hours ago

People are using LLMs to diagnose disease, write prescriptions, deny health care claims, deny loans and grants, write scientific papers, review scientific papers, draft engineering and architectural documents, and talk to their loved ones

Despair

[–] Steve@communick.news 9 points 8 hours ago

Very well. If you don't want me to tell you the truth about people using LLMs to make passwords, I won't.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 hours ago

I imagine, it's a matter of asking it to generate some configuration and one of the fields in that configuration is for a password, so the LLM just auto-completes what a password is most likely to look like.

[–] KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago

Getting away from more direct requests I can absolutely imagine AI offering passwords/suggestions as part of a coding session. Including "temp" passwords that look secure so "why bother changing it?".

[–] Melobol@lemmy.ml 13 points 8 hours ago (4 children)
[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 6 points 7 hours ago

Many password manager generators already do (use the "memorable" type).

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

The problem is that in this case, the LLM just naively auto-completes a password from what it knows a password to most likely look like.

It is possible to enable an LLM to call external tools and to provide it with instructions, so that it's likely to auto-complete the tool call instead. Then you could have it call a tool to generate a correct horse battery staple, or a completely random password by e.g. calling the pwgen command on Linux.

But yeah, that just isn't what this article is about. It's specifically about cases where an LLM is used without tool calls and therefore naively auto-completes the most likely password-like string.

[–] Melobol@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 hours ago

I'm kinda interested how nany accounts you could log in with those strings :D

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago

pls don't spread my password around like that

[–] 64bithero@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

Yes!

QuiltedNematoadNotepad486

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 5 points 8 hours ago

LLM-generated passwords

This is akin to asking Karen from accounting to generate a password for you, and trusting that it will be a true random and secure password and that she won't yap about it to everyone.

That statement is one of the painfully dumbest things I've read in my life, and I've read the bible.

[–] 64bithero@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago

Irregular ? Like my bowel movements ?

[–] mr_anny@sopuli.xyz 3 points 8 hours ago

Not again this horrible web design/engine whatever laggin/stuttering the way it almost induce a epileptic seizure in me.