That almost sounds like you're saying that we should occasionally use an all-lowercase, 5 character password...

I'm guessing that you're taking the assumption that those 10% of people are going to tweak their password until they get a "Strong" result and then quit. And then the space of all weaker passwords is bigger than the space of all "just-barely-strong" passwords.

I would suggest that, instead of just a "weak", "medium" "strong" set, a continuum value may be good. There would then be no natural place to stop improving, and less clustering of the passwords around that point.

Some things to consider in the strength calculation would be

• length (not directly, just as a consequence of adding more credit-worthy password features)
• size of the symbol set
• reduced credit for the first/last character expanding the set (eg: 'Password' isn't much better than 'password', but 'paSswORd' does get full credit for the inclusion of caps)
• reduced credit for substrings that are similar to dictionary words.
• reduced value for date and name substrings
• throw in tests against any common patterns you can think of, like the first couple digits of Pi.

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