Guy Rutenberg

I’ve released today the new version of spass, a tool that creates cryptographically strong passwords and passphrases by generating random bits from your sound card.

In the user facing side, spass can now create passphrases as long as passwords. The words for the passphrases are chosen out of a list of 8192 words which means each word adds 13 bits of entropy to the passphrase.

spass can now use one of three audio backends (the old version could only use OSS):

• Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA)
• Open Sound System (OSS)
• PortAudio

The PortAudio support will hopefully make it easy to port spass to other platforms as well (such as Windows). The random number generator got overhauled and now there is an unbiasing step before applying the hash function. This should help getting consistent results in terms of entropy. In the backstage I’ve migrated the project from autotools to cmake.

You can find more information, as well as both source and binary packages in https://github.com/guyru/spass.

This is a complete rewrite of my secure password generator. The new version uses my a true random number generator (and here).

The major change was using the new true random number generator in order to ensure strong passwords. Less significant changes include an easy way to specify password’s strips, and some calling convention changes.

Usage examples:

$ ./spass
E5pT35Fg
$ ./spass -l 14
R$tfOm4g_yRQ2J
$ ./spass -s 0-9a-f -l 32
8b5f14a1eeaabe58c2878ab5416a9ebb

Download the tarball spass-2.0.tar.bz2. The program depends on Boost‘s program_options (it was tested against version 1.37 and 1.42 and should work with other versions too).

This is a new version of my /dev/random based secure password generator – spass. The new version doesn’t have new features, it’s mainly a bug-fix release. The package now uses autotools, which means it has the standard configure script and makefile. I also fixed some typos in the help message. Overall the new version doesn’t offer anything new compared to the old one, except for easier installation.
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spass is a secure password generation tool. spass was designed under the assumption that a password generator is as good as its random number generator, so spass uses the Random class, a /dev/random based cryptographically strong random number generator class. As always, I tried to make the command-line interface as user-friendly as possible (as much as a command-line interface can be friendly).
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