I found out from this site that GPG can be used to generate random text for passwords. Here’s the command:

 gpg --gen-random 1 20 | gpg --enarmor | sed -n 5p

Very simple. I may have to use this in the future.

WARNING

This limits you to the Base64 character set, greatly limiting the search space for password cracking.  One should really use something other than enarmor to spit out a random printable ASCII string…

Update

OK, I did it.  It took some time, but it works nicely now, and generates MUCH better passwords:

hank@tardis:/nexus/tardis/hank$ for i in 1 2 3 4; \
  do gpg --gen-random 1 20 | \
  perl -ne's/[\x00-\x20]/chr(ord($^N)+50)/ge;s/([\x7E-\xDB])/chr(ord($^N)-93)/ge;s/([\xDC-\xFF])/chr(ord($^N)-129)/ge;print $_, "\n"';
done
p8$K`frjdkp;i-c2]2a2
glj#""I/eY\aYe3p}2y@
U2cXL&2^2/@7P2d#;?E=
kG)|N?[ZP2t2'bH22e;$

I know that probably looks like gobbledy-gook, but the main part of it is this:

gpg --gen-random 1 20 | perl -ne'print "Your password: ";s/[\x00-\x20]/chr(ord($^N)+50)/ge;s/([\x7E-\xDB])/chr(ord($^N)-93)/ge;s/([\xDC-\xFF])/chr(ord($^N)-129)/ge;print $_, "\n"'

Run that in a terminal, and profit.

Uncategorized linux, passwords

I wanted to generate a new password today and I decided I would try a command
line utility that does just that. It’s called pwgen.

hank@rura-penthe ~ $ sudo apt-get install pwgen
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  pwgen
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 18.7kB of archives.
After unpacking 77.8kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.osuosl.org edgy/main pwgen 2.05-1ubuntu1 [18.7kB]
Fetched 18.7kB in 0s (28.2kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package pwgen.
(Reading database ... 173873 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking pwgen (from .../pwgen_2.05-1ubuntu1_i386.deb) ...
Setting up pwgen (2.05-1ubuntu1) ...

Now the fun begins.

hank@rura-penthe ~ $ pwgen -sy 16 10
YaQcm?3@Ty~c=U|$     cthv{@O*|X79&=k_     |Fr&PH#b2%.>}*Wo     rOtTfJ^.GP=l{L41
Wb?%i[42y'Q'pF+F     0M`N9{I:8;9Eii}<     *vP~-N,ofuIXE{`1     ^Rq[?xm#"\1EQ~wl
'I9JIktnw`bW@zH>     >/FD6+tdc;+SINHx

Now, I have a bunch of passwords to select from. -s gives me ‘secure’
passwords which are very hard to remember. Lucky for me I have a good memory
for hard to remember things (though things that are easy to remember escape
me). -y gives me symbols since a larger character set always enhances a
password. Now, I’m all set to do battle.

Uncategorized linux, passwords, ubuntu