Guy Rutenberg » spass

spass-2.0 – Secure Password Generator

Guy — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 11:44:14 +0000

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).

spass 1.1 – Secure Password Generator

Guy — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:14:59 +0000

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.

spass – A Secure Password Generator Utility

Guy — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:22:52 +0000

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.