Friday, December 16, 2011

Re: password generator

On 12/16/11 07:35, Steve Hall wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 3:36 AM, lith wrote:
> The best passwords include the most character possibilities. This
> crazy notion websites/software have of restricting them to certain
> characters or counts only means less security because they are more
> easily guessed.

It's true that larger character sets diminish the ability to
brute-force the password, but length is also a factor. And
there's the ability to remember that password without writing it
down. A password that has 25 alphanumeric characters beats the
pants off an 8-character mixed-printable in terms of time to
complete. Steve Gibson (security guy) goes so far as to suggest
keeping some secret thing you can repeat to pad out your length,
such as adding 15 ampersands or 8 period-followed-by-comma pairs
after your password to give it extra length.[1]

That said, if you run vim with +python built in, you can use this
one-liner:

:python import random as r, string as s, vim as v; v.command('let
@"="'+(''.join([r.choice(s.printable.replace('"', '')) for i in
range(10)]))+'"')

which will preload the scratch register with a random password of
length 10 (in this case) chosen from printable-characters (minus
the double-quote for simplicity instead of escaping). You can
then paste that just as you would anything you've yanked.

-tim

[1] https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm


--
You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist.
Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to.
For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php

No comments: