This is probably fine. The connection to DDG will be over HTTPS, so a captured packet would need to be decoded first. And if someone were to manage to break the encryption, then they would also need to know what service you used the password for.

Ultimately, it's more secure to generate locally, but it would be a huge amount of work to get anything usable out of a packet capture

You are not overthinking it. Exploiting this would be a bit more complex than capturing a packet on the wire, but it is possible.

If you intend to use a passphrase for anything important, it's best to generate it locally.

With https as protocol, picked up data packets won't do much harm.
But relying on anything but a local password manager is imho still a bad idea.

Yeah I think I'll just click an icon in my password manager instead.

There are certainly better ideas.

This is probably ok. First of all, they're probably actually doing it in Javascript in the browser. It probably never travels over the network at all. And, if it did, with HTTPS it would be hard to intercept and decrypt except by a government or something.

But, it still gives me the willies to generate a password on a web page. Fundamentally a web browser is still a tool for sending and receiving data over the Internet, and that's not the kind of tool I'd want to be generating something that I don't want other people to know or see.

What happens if there's a bug? If the password is being generated in an app on my local system a badly designed app with a bug could maybe log my newly generated password in a local log file somewhere. If there's a bug in DuckDuckGo's javascript, who knows where that newly generated password might be logged?

I've started using https://neal.fun/password-game/ to generate passwords 😊

my favorite is "qr code" best and easiest qr code generator

Uuid

All I see is *******.

correct horse battery staple

If you have a password vault, use the vault first.

For rotating PC login credentials, I use codified passphrases. They typically meet security needs, are unique and nearly unguessable because it could be ANYTHING in your office, and don't contain dictionary words. Example:

Annual evaluations are due before summer. Be sure to mention the Grodsky project! aeadB4S.Bs2mtGp.

Where did Julie's candy go? I ate it! She'll never know >:D

WdJcg?I8i!Snn>:D

Even if I had a perfectly secure connection, I'm still getting a password from a service that could be tracking me.

That's great if you only have a couple of online accounts, but get past a few dozen and you're toast. I don't know about you, but I sure can't remember 50+ unique pass phrases. However, I can remember the one for my password manager, which has 30+ random character passwords for all my accounts.

Pass phrases for things that need to be human readable/rememberable.

Generated strings for everything else.

Because a pass phrase is inherently vulnerable to a dictionary attack because... it is words. You can obfuscate that but all the ways that would actually not compromise the readability are also pretty well known (whether that is "a=@" or "every 'e' is a 'b'" and so forth.

Is a 96 character pass phrase meaningfully more vulnerable than a 16 character generated string? That gets into the realm of hypotheticals and "one day we'll have quantum computers" but you are generally looking at a situation where everything is fucked anyway or there is a very targeted attack on you... at which point "hmm. 96 characters? Must be a pass phrase". So... not the venue to discuss.

But, at that point... if you are using a password manager/vault anyway...

Also the reality is that anyone who has ever dealt with a bank or some other "legacy" website rapidly learns that there are max lengths for passwords because they are more afraid of allocating a few extra megabytes for the SQL database than anything else. At which point your pass phrase goes out the window and you are back to "p@$$w0rd" level bullshit (or, better yet, you have a mental model/style of password).

That's what I'm thinking. Is it really so hard to just make up s random string of symbols? I do it all the time but use acronym type things to remember it.