Tag Archives: passwords

KeePassX: The Perfect Password App

October 16, 2011

Recently, I’ve been having some trouble with passwords. Either the login name is a string I never use, and therefore never commit to memory (like my real phone number that I mask with Google Voice), or the password policy forces me to use a password that I’ll never remember (like sites that keep track of your past passwords, or require 11 characters of alternating symbols, letters and numbers, etc.). Since I use spamgourmet, any site that requires an email address [...]

Good Passwords with GnuPG

August 22, 2009

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. [...]

Horray for pwgen

November 4, 2006

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 [...]