Comments on: Linux: Generating Strong Passwords Using random/urandom

By: Passwords « Home@Computer:~$

Passwords « Home@Computer:~$ — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 07:52:33 +0000

[...] for an even more secure password. For more information on this (and other aspects) go and read this post. It should answer some, if not most, of your [...]

By: kcollo

kcollo — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:48:16 +0000

Nice. Just as fast and do not get the miscellaneous output that you would with the “dd” command. This is another good alternative simple command line argument to generate password(s). Thanks!

By: xciton

xciton — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:22:17 +0000

The output of md5sum is base 16, where as using tr with [:alnum:] gives you base 62. Given the same length, the tr method provides a much higher resolution password.

I use:

cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc [:alnum:] | head -c48; echo

By: kcollo

kcollo — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:47:50 +0000

I agree, using tr makes the command hard to remember. I actually just copy and paste it when needed, or copy a list of generated ones to a pad for future use. I definitely do like you option of using md5sum. I was worried about passing non-ascii characters over, but looks like it works fine! When not mass generating accounts, I think I will actually use the md5sum method. Thanks!

By: Draco

Draco — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:48:52 +0000

You know what I like to do…

dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 | md5sum

Then I copy the resulting hash and use that as the password.
Sometimes I also use

dd if=/dev/random count=1 | openssl base64

None of these passwords are human rememberable, so there’s usually no real reason not to make it 32 characters instead, and use copy+paste to enter passwords and store them in the password vault.

Of course one can grab a few characters out of them and use that slice.

The long tr commands are a bit much to type on a system.