How do you generate passwords? [closed]

Answer 1

I used an unusual method of generating passwords recently. They didn't need to be super strong, and random passwords are just too hard to remember. My application had a huge table of cities in North America. To generate a password, I generated a random number, grabbed a randon city, and added another random number.

boston9934

The lengths of the numbers were random, (as was if they were appended, prepended, or both), so it wasn't too easy to brute force.

Answer 2

Well, my technique is to use first letters of the words of my favorite songs. Need an example: Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you...

Give me:

enimdisyify

... and a little of insering numbers e.g. i=1, o=0 etc...

en1md1sy1fy

... capitalization? Always give importance to yourself :)

And the final password is...

en1Md1sy1fy

Answer 3

Use this & thumps up :)

cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9-!@#$%^&*()_+~' | fold -w 10 | head -n 1

Change the head count to generate number of passwords.

Answer 4

An slight variation on your suggestion:

head -c 32 /dev/random | base64

Optionally, you can trim the trailing = and use echo to get a newline:

echo $(head -c 32 /dev/random | base64 | head -c 32)

which gives you a more predictable output length password whilst still ensuring only printable characters.

Answer 5

I use https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm to generate long password strings for things like WPA keys. You could also use this (via screenscraping) to create salts for authentication password hashing if you have to implement some sort of registration site.

Answer 6

Having read and tried out some of the great answers here, I was still in search of a generation technique that would be easy to tweak and used very common Linux utils and resources.

I really liked the gpg --gen-random answer but it felt a bit clunky?

I found this gem after some further searching

echo $(</dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c8)