Generating secure passwords
For selecting secure passwords, here’s what is recommended:
- Passwords should be at LEAST
1016 characters in length. - Include letters (mixed case), numbers and special characters.
Using pwgen to generate secure password
Here’s my go-to command line method for secure password generation. The command I use is:
pwgen -y 32
Even more secure:
pwgen -ys 32
-y, –symbols Include at least one special character in the password. -s, –secure Generate completely random, hard-to-memorize passwords. These should only be used for machine passwords, since otherwise it’s almost guaranteed that users will simply write the password on a piece of paper taped to the monitor…
32 the length of generated passwords. Need fewer generated passwords? Use pwgen -ys 32 1 where 1 = the number of password results.
More about pwgen here. On most Linux distros you can install pwgen using the package manager. For example:
Use the urandom command to generate secure passwords
Recommended urandom
< /dev/urandom tr -dc '[:graph:]' | head -c16;echo;
Right-hand only urandom
< /dev/urandom tr -dc '67890^*_+-=;:,.?yuiopYUIOPhjklHJKLbnmBNM' | head -c16;echo;
Left-hand only urandom
< /dev/urandom tr -dc '12345!@#$%qwertQWERTasdfgASDFGzxcvbZXCVB' | head -c16;echo;
Make this into a simple easy to remember command
Edit your bashrc
vi ~/.bashrc
Add this line:
spwd(){ < /dev/urandom tr -dc '[:graph:]' | head -c16;echo; }
Save and restart server or even better just reload bash using:
source ~/.bash_profile
Now in future just type the following to generate a secure password:
spwd
