Secure PIN Generator — Random PINs

A PIN is short by design, and short means every character carries weight. The 10 000 possible 4-digit combinations are exhausted in seconds by any attacker who can make 100 guesses per second, which is why rate limiting and lockout policies matter far more for short PINs than for long passwords, and why even a 6-digit PIN sits at roughly 20 bits of entropy rather than the 60+ bits a 10-character mixed-case password delivers.

PIN Generator skips the alphabet entirely for numeric mode and draws each digit from crypto.getRandomValues, which guarantees a uniform distribution with no modular bias. The first digit is never zero, so a 6-digit result is always six digits long rather than five in a context that treats leading zeros as insignificant. Alphanumeric mode uses an unambiguous 32-character pool: I, O, 0 and 1 are excluded because they are visually interchangeable on most screens and in most handwritten notes.

Running a PIN Generation Session

1. Pick a PIN Length: 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, or 16 characters. The strength bar below the output updates immediately; a 6-digit numeric PIN reads Weak, an 8-digit one reads Good.
2. Choose a Character Set: Numeric for digit-only device unlock codes, Alphanumeric for short access codes where letters are acceptable, or Hex for hardware tokens and debug identifiers.
3. Set Display Grouping to Pairs or Groups of 4 if the PIN needs to be read aloud or manually transcribed. Grouping does not change the underlying value, only what is shown and copied.
4. Increase Batch Size to 5, 10, or 20 to generate a full set at once, useful for pre-loading test accounts or printing a sheet of backup recovery codes. Each PIN in the batch is an independent draw.
5. Hit Generate New PIN (or Generate N PINs in batch mode), then copy individual PINs or the whole list with Copy All.

How the Math Works: Bits per Digit by Mode

Numeric PINs carry log₂(10) ≈ 3.32 bits per digit. That puts a 4-digit PIN at 13.3 bits, trivially brute-forced without lockout. A 6-digit PIN reaches 19.9 bits, which is the floor for a locked-screen device that enforces a delay after five wrong attempts. An 8-digit PIN at 26.6 bits is considered strong under a 10-attempt lockout policy; beyond 10 digits the entropy exceeds what any consumer device attacker can realistically traverse on-device. Alphanumeric mode uses a 32-character pool, so an 8-character alphanumeric PIN delivers 40 bits, roughly equivalent to a 12-digit numeric PIN.

When Not to Use a Short PIN

• Never use a PIN as a standalone credential for an account that lacks rate limiting or lockout. A 6-digit PIN with no rate limit is fully brute-forced in under 17 minutes at 1 000 guesses per second.
• PINs generated here are not stored anywhere, but typing any secret into a browser tab means the page can in principle read it. Use a PIN you generate here as a temporary seed or a test value, not as the real PIN for a live account.
• Grouping characters with dashes (e.g. 4821-39) is a display convenience only. The copied value uses dashes exactly as shown, so paste it only into a field that accepts them. A pure-numeric ATM PIN entry does not.