Nicolai Rosen on Thu, 2 Mar 2000 17:45:56 -0500 (EST)


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Re: Generate a password


8 characters, but it'll work anyway as it just truncates the end.

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Robert Spier wrote:
> 
> [ergh. .sent my first reply with the wrong From line..  I gotta find a 
> better way to have emacs do that configuration...]
> 
> >>>>> "AB" == Alex Barylo <hash1024@yahoo.com> writes:
>   AB> I hope you'll be able to help me out here guys.  I need to
>   AB> generate a couple of hundred passwords. I don't want them to be
>   AB> completely random, because users will not memorize them and will
>   AB> end up writing them down. Damn, they are going to write them
>   AB> down anyway, aren't they? I'd like them to be
>   AB> pronouncable/memorizable.  Like Unix passwd utility does.
> 
> We have a utility at work which spits out passwords in this form:
> 
> [snip]
>  1. RIFLE@weird        2. CHATTEL8zero       3. garbled3MACE      
>  4. maul7Safe          5. chunk7Who          6. Storied!shy       
> [snip]
> 
> basically <word><punctuation or number><word>, with random choice
> capitalization (lower, proper, upper).
> 
> It's about 180 lines of well formatted (i.e. whitespace happy) perl
> code.
> 
> It basically uses /usr/dict/words as its word file.
> 
> A lot of the code in our version is specialized to generate passwords
> of a certain length. . I you don't need that, you could probably
> rewrite this as a one-off in about 10 lines of perl.
> 
> We use MD5 hashes to store our passwords, so we're not subject to
> crypt's 7 (or is it 8) character limit.
> 
> In other applicatiosn where I've needed to generate passwords, I've
> used simple hash functions with random numbers to generate wild
> looking *@KJdf2 type passwords.  These are hard to rememember
> sometimes, but if they're writing them down anyway, it's better than
> the word based ones.
> 
> Also, your password system may not like the words above, because it
> may detect that part of the string is a dictionary word.
> 
> -R
> 
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Nicolai Rosen
nick@netaxs.com
Earthstation/Netaxs

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