Guy Rutenberg » spass http://www.guyrutenberg.com Keeping track of what I do Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:53:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 spass 1.1 – Secure Password Generator http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2008/05/04/spass-11-secure-password-generator/ http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2008/05/04/spass-11-secure-password-generator/#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 20:14:59 +0000 Guy http://www.guyrutenberg.com/?p=55 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.

You can download the new release from spass-1.1.tar.bz2. Installation procedure is a tad different. All you need to do now (after you untar the tarball) is ./configure && make switch to root and execute make install.

]]> http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2008/05/04/spass-11-secure-password-generator/feed/ 2 spass – A Secure Password Generator Utility http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2007/10/20/spass-a-secure-password-generator-utility/ http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2007/10/20/spass-a-secure-password-generator-utility/#comments Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:22:52 +0000 Guy http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2007/10/20/spass-a-secure-password-generator-utility/ 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).

Download

You can download spass from here.

Install

Installation is pretty straight forward, just untar the archive and run make ; make install. This will compile spass and place it under /usr/bin.

Usage

spass can do all sorts of password generation, and do it in a user-friendly command line interface.

To create a simple password containing alphanumeric characters and some special symbols, just run spass 10 where 10 specifies the length of the password. You can control the character range from which passwords are created using command line flags. For example spass -a 8 will create 8 character long alphanumeric only password. There are flags for numbers only, lowercase, uppercase, hexadecimal, and extended special symbols set.

You can generate multiple passwords at once. For example spass -N 5 7 will create five 7 character long passwords.

As spass uses /dev/random for random number generation, it may block when entropy levels are low. When generating large amount of passwords, one may want to call spass-f flag, to instruct it to use /dev/urandom. Using /dev/urandom results in lower quality of random numbers, but much faster password generation for large amounts of passwords.

There are more features for spass, run spass --help to see a full list of features.

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