Getting Qualified Passwords for Bank of America

Password requirements of the website(Bank of America)

  • Contain 8 to 20 characters

  • At least 1uppercase letters, 1lowercase letters, and 1 number

  • Can not repeat the same number or letter more than 3 times in a row

  • Not include spaces

  • Contains only the following speacial characters:@#*()+={}/?~;,.-_

Each password manager gets ten stars at the beginning and has ten times to generate suitable passwords. They will lose one star for one unqualified password, two stars for two unqualified passwords, and so on. They might also lose extra stars due to its inconvenient setting.

Setting process of each password manager

Bitwarden: 0 star

It lost 10 stars ( 2 stars for its unfriendly setting and 8 stars for 8 failures).

  • Annoying to drag the thumb of the seekbar (lost 1 star here)

    It was annoying to drag the thumb of the seekbar to the 12 exactly.

  • Need to check passwords carefully (lost 1 star here)

    Some special characters in the password generator are not allowed to use in this website. We needed to check special characters in passwords carefully to know whether they are suitable for the website.

However, users couldn’t forbid using some specific character(like &, ^). As a result, there were eight failures in generating qualified passwords.

Enpass: 8 stars

It lost 8 stars (2 stars for its unfriendly setting ).

  • Annoying to drag the thumb of the seekbar (lost 1 star here)

    It was annoying to drag the thumb of the seekbar to the 12 exactly.

  • Inconvenient to enter the specific special symbols(lost 1 star here)

    After clicking more options, users can exclude/include some specific characters ( !@#$%^&…). To meet the website requirements, we typed some symbols(@#*()+={}?) suited for the website(see screenshot below) and got 10 suitable passwords. But it is inconvenient for users to type the specific symbols by themselves.

LastPass: 6 stars

It lost 4 stars ( 2 stars for its unfriendly setting and 2 stars for 2 failures).

  • Annoying to drag the thumb of the seeker bar(lost 1 star here)

    Users first needed to change the password length to 12.

  • Check passwords carefully (lost 1 star here)

    Because we can only see three special characters on the password generator page, we needed to check special characters in passwords carefully to know whether they are suitable for the website.

  • Inconvenient to save an account quickly for ten steps (lose 1 star here).

    When chossing “Bank account” in Lastpass, we found there was no option for passwords generation(see the vedio below).

Therefore we still chose the option of “Passwords”. As a result, it needs ten steps to save an account, which is very inconvenient for users.

First tap ”add”, “passwords”, “add new passwords”, “name “, then click passwords and open the generating password page, next generate passwords, next tap “done” , “use this password”, and finally “save” it.

It either did not allow users to choose some specific characters listed by the website, resulting in two failures in generating suitable passwords.

KeePassium: 7 stars

It lost 3 stars(for its unfriendly setting).

  • Need to change the mode from “Basic” to “Expert”(lost 1 star here)

    Otherwise users couldn’t change the passwords options.

  • Annoying to drag the thumb of the seeker bar(lost 1 star here)

    Users first needed to change the password length to 12.

  • Time-consuming to type the specific characters(lost 1 star here)

KeePassium allowed users to exclude specific characters by entering the characters. It took more time to type the particular characters. Because users needed to turn off the choice of special characters, clicked the box “required” and then typed the suitable special characters(like @, #) (see the screenshot below). Therefore it lost 1 star for these unfriendly settings.

KeePass DX: 7 stars

It lost 3 stars (for its unfriendly setting).

  • Typing the excluded characters into the box of ignore characters (lost 1 star here)

  • Choosing “at least one character from each” (lost 1 star here)

    Users needed to choose the option of “at least one character from each”; otherwise, it might fail to create qualified passwords even having selected the appropriate options.

  • Making the passwords readable(lost 1 star here)

    Users could not read the passwords if they forgot to tape an eye icon near the password. The passwords were shown in dots by default.

KeePass XC: 7 stars

It lost 3 stars (for its unfriendly setting).

The same situation (in KeePass DX) can be seen in KeePass XC, so it also lost 3 star for these unfriendly settings.

Zero password manager: 10 stars

It got 10 stars.

Unlike previous password managers, in step 4, Zero password manager allowed users to easily choose the specific characters by clicking the character. We cleared all the default special characters to have suitable passwords and then chose one or two required characters. By doing this, users got qualified passwords every time.