Password Generators

Imagine needing to come up with passwords all the time, which is not impossible.
However, why not leverage tools for doing that. After all, generating random passwords is a important step.
Let’s explore some of the options out there and see what can be done.

pwgen

One of my favorites, period. Using pwgen is easy and the tool itself is available everywhere.

Installation:

$ sudo apt install pwgen
$ sudo pacman -S pwgen
$ sudo pkg install pwgen

Now, let’s look at a example:

$ pwgen 32 1

This will generate one passwort with a length of 32 characters. Easy.
pwgen can do more than that though.

$ pwgen -cyn 32 1

Explanation:

• Include at least one capital letter (-c)
• Include at least one special character (-y)
• Include at least one number (-n)
• Generate one password of length 32 characters

Diceware

Diceware is antoher very useful utility to generate so called passphrases. A passphrase is something one can actually remember - instead of glueing random characters together.

Installation (Not packaged for FreeBSD):

$ sudo apt install diceware
$ sudo yay -S diceware (AUR)

Following, a example:

$ diceware --no-caps -d " " -n 4

Explanation:

• No capitalized characters (–no-caps)
• Delimiter (Space)
• Number of words used (-n 4)

Example Output:

magician vice goliath diagram

As you can for sure tell, the generated passphrase is quite easy to commit to memory.

xkcdpass

Another quit useful tool for generating passphrases is xkcdpass which is easy to use.

Installation:

$ sudo apt install xkcdpass
$ sudo pacman -S xkcdpass
$ sudo pkg install py311-xkcdpass

Example usage:

$ xkcdpass

Example Output:

taunt playmaker aviation shout unbent tiara

Same as diceware, the generated passphrases are easier to remember than having long strings of random characters/numbers.

Shell magic (Bonus)

One can also generate passwords without using external tools.
The following command generates a 32 character password leveraging just builtin commands.

$ tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 </dev/urandom | head -c 32; echo

Another example:

$ cat /dev/urandom | env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc a-zA-Z0-9 | head -c 32; echo

Using OpenSSL

Another option is using the openssl commandline utility. Since the command openssl is available everywhere, this will give some flexibility - if nothing else is at hand.

$ openssl rand -base64 32
$ openssl rand -hex 32

Explanation:

• The first call to openssl generates a random Base64 value
• The second call to openssl does the same except it uses Hexadecimal

Yet antoher way

The quickest and cheapest way to generate a password in my opinion would be to just calculate a hash from a file for example and using this very hash as a password.

$ sha1sum /etc/fstab

Output:

a0667f7cc12164bcca8fc0ca3f9492537818185a  /etc/fstab

Although, using a proper password generator is still the best option if you ask me.

Closing words

There are multiple ways one can go to generate passwords - And I’m sure that there are many more ways.
The example/commands given here serve as a example on how flexible different commands are.
As always, everyone has there own favorit or way to do it.

Hope you enjoyed the article.

Stay Open!