[ale] A simple pseudorandom password generator

[Jim Kinney]

You actually make reasonable passwords for users? !?!
I set their account for must change and passwd= imadumbdork
They tend to not forget after a change or two
Bofh rules!
On Oct 1, 2011 12:47 PM, "Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> Hey! Things are quiet! Im'ma stir 'em up! :-)
>
> I put together a stupid little Python script to read bytes from
> /dev/urandom and chuck them out as PGP word lists. I thought there
> might be some people on the list that would be interested in it.
>
> I'm not sure how to actually compute the entropy of the passwords that
> it generates, though; the rules of the PGP word list are kind of cool
> but strange. There is a word list of 512 words. 256 of them are used
> in the "even" position, and 256 of them are used in the "odd"
> position. So, for each position there are 256 possibilities.
> Naďely, I'd say that there are thus 256^n possibilities for each
> possible password attempt.
>
> *BUT* that's not quite the way it works, since there are two different
> symbol sets. If there were 512 possible symbols all the way through
> the password, it'd be 512^n. Of course, this ain't that, either.
>
> I'd be inclined to say that it's probably something along the lines of
> 256^n * 2. But I don't know. Perhaps Mike W. can chip in to help me
> understand that.
>
> Anyway, I didn't actually make this *for* password generation, but
> it'd be a lot better than the tool I am using for my users currently
> for setting initial passwords, so I'm going to start using it for
> that. :-)
>
> Script is attached.
>
> --- Mike
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20111001/34d72f34/attachment.html