Differences between version 13 and previous revision of ChoosingPasswords.
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Newer page: | version 13 | Last edited on Friday, October 22, 2004 5:20:10 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
Older page: | version 12 | Last edited on Friday, October 22, 2004 9:05:12 am | by PerryLorier | Revert |
@@ -1,36 +1,20 @@
PerryLorier's prefered way of choosing passwords:
- cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc ' -~' | fold -w 20 | head -1
-I highly recommend it for everybody.
+<verbatim>
+tr -dc ' -~' < /dev/urandom | head -c 20
+</verbatim>
-(My new password is _]}e9pgU5-u6_hr[KF|*
).
+(''every time you waste a cat, god kills a kitten''
)
-/dev/urandom is an interface to the kernel's random number generator. If you cat it, you'll get (mostly) random characters. See random(4)
for information
.
+Highly recommended
for everybody
.
-tr
(1)
is a character translator.
-d stands for 'delete characters in this set' and -c stands for 'compliment'. If you check ascii(7) you will see that space and tilde (
~) are the outer limits of the 'typeable'
[ASCII] character set. The translator stage will throw away anything lower than space or higher than tilde (all the high-bit [ASCII] character
).
+(His new password
is <tt>_]}e9pgU5
-u6_hr
~[KF|*</tt>
).
-fold(1) wraps lines
to a certain width. -w 20 wraps at 20 characters
(the default is 80.) Mere mortals will probably
want to set this
to around 8.
+Another popular method is
to take the first letter of each word in
a line from a song
(eg ''I
want to ride my bicycle'' -> <tt>iw2rmb</tt>), or a phrase you can remember and changing letters
to numbers (<tt>foursquare</tt> -> <tt>f0ursqu4r3</tt>)
-head(1) (the opposite
of tail(1)) returns the first lines of an input. head -1 returns only the first line. (use head -n 8 if
you want some choices
to pick from)
.
+If none
of these methods are to your liking,
you can always set your password
to <tt>gandalf</tt>. This is highly original, and noone is likely to think of it
.
-----
+You might find more information on the SecurityNotes page.
-PerryLorier won this week's [useless use of cat award|http://www.sektorn.mooo.com/era/unix/award.html]. The fold(1) is also redundant since head(1) has a __-c__ parameter. In a pinch,
-
- tr -dc ' -~' < /dev/urandom | head -c 20
-
-Cheers. :)
-
---AristotlePagaltzis
-
-''every time you waste a cat, god kills a kitten''
-
-----
-
-Another popular method is to take the first letter of each word in a line from a song (eg 'I want to ride my bicycle' -> iwtrmb), or a phrase you can remember and changing letters to numbers ('foursquare' -> 'f0ursqu4r3')
-
-If none of these methods are to your liking, you can always set your password to "gandalf". This is highly original, and no-one is likely to think of it.
-
-You might find more information on the SecurityNotes page.
----
CategorySecurity