I was hoping someone could recommend a good password generator.
Extra props to the person who can name one that gives you a mnemonic to remember it as well.
I was hoping someone could recommend a good password generator.
Extra props to the person who can name one that gives you a mnemonic to remember it as well.
pwgen generates random, meaningless but pronounceable passwords. These passwords contain either only lowercase letters, or upper and lower case mixed, or digits thrown in. Uppercase letters and digits are placed in a way that eases remembering their position when memorizing only the word. .
Install pwgen with the button below:
e.g.
apg
APG is the Advanced Password Generator. The software is used to automatically generate new passwords for whatever use you feel like putting it to.
Here are some key features of "APG":
To install, run this command:
Install and using Apg with this help guide
Aberystwyth University has a pretty hardcore mnenomic-passsword generator.
http://www.aber.ac.uk/cgi-bin/user/syswww/gw/mnemonic
Generates evil password like this:
Interesting work. You might like to email their sysops to see if the script behind it is freely available (and if it's not, whether they'd consider GPLing it)
Edit: Looking at the output a little more cafefully, this would not be hard to code. You'd just need several dictionaries to feed it.
Try the password card. You carry it in your wallet and you remember two symbols and a color.
You read the letters / numbers between the symbols along a color line, or make up any algorithm that you can remember.
The site generates a random card for you.
http://www.passwordcard.org/en
The results are more hideous even than apg or pwgen (even with the
-s
option set), but this is more fun:I suspect your use case if different, but this kind of thing is useful for shared secret keys, and other kinds of passwords that you don't type in very often.
To get a larger selection, pass more bytes to
head
, and to get longer password result strings, modify--bytes
instrings
(which gives a minimum length). thesed
expression strips out strips out spaces and tabs (represented by\s
).However, you will at some point probably appreciate applications (like pwgen, KeePassX or LastPass) that give you an option to avoid easily confusable characters, like
1
andl
andI
. These can look like1Il
or 1Il or worse. You would want to use an option like this if you are resetting someone's password or giving a one-time passkey that needs to be communicated.Stil,
pwgen
put gives this caveat in its man page, describing its-B
option:This is nuts, of course. You probably know when this is useful or not. And it's certainly better than using 'Pa$$w0rD' for everything. If in doubt, create a longer password, or pass your generated password as input to another generator, or use multi-factor authentication.
I use
mkpasswd
. While technically it is used to encrypt a password for use inside an/etc/passwd
file, it also gives nice strings of characters suitable for passwords.No mnemonics, but pwgen is pretty straightforward.
I use
apg
--sudo apt-get install apg
Keypass has a built in password generator. Generate your new password and remember it with the same tool.
SuperGenPass is a bookmarklet solution originally intended for website logins, but it can easily be used for applications, too. It uses a master password plus the current domain name (or application name, if you like) to generate 10-character passwords like
lCY9gjiDtF
. It doesn't need mnemonics because it can one-click auto-fill the password box, and allows copy/paste into other applications too.I keep a bookmarklet in each of my browsers, and on my cell phone (works offline, too!). It's very convenient. If you're "brave" then you could even hardcode the master password into the bookmarklet.