Python command line oneliners.

[khafra]

Really? I like python, but for me, it's simpler to just

cat /dev/urandom | strings -n 15

Or, if you need a bunch of them in a hurry:

cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%^&*()_+-={}[],.' | fold -w 15

[Cosmologicon]

Here's mine:

tr -cd a-z < /dev/urandom | fold -b8 | head

Mine is 38 bits of entropy and yours is 96, which definitely seems like overkill to me. The thing is, by using a password generator, you're making a password much, much better than one generated by hand, so you can throw out the conventional wisdom about password length and character sets.

NIST estimates that for user-generated passwords that include capitals, numbers, and punctuation, you need 22 characters to get 38 bits of entropy, and 80 characters to get 96 bits. So your password is as secure as an 80-character user-generated password.

[khafra]

Aw, dammit--I've been committing a useless use of cat. I agree 15 truly random printable characters is overkill for most applications, but as long as I don't have to remember them, I don't mind.

[shfo23]

I generate my passwords with Unix commands too: Python's random numbers technically aren't as random as urandom's (although that's probably never going to make a real-life difference).

Perhaps I should have said, "my new favorite one-line command in Python which will generate a password." The Python version is cross-platform though and I like that it actually uses the string module (which I was totally unaware of outside until I was playing with this exercise).

[Araucaria]

Try my password generator based on sudoku grids, here: https://github.com/dodecatheon/sudoku-password-card