passgen

passgen is a unix command line tool for generating passwords. It generates passwords by turning bytes from /dev/urandom into characters in the desired character set using the try-and-throw-away algorithm from Section 9.7 of Cryptography Engineering (Ferguson, Schneier, Kohno).

It supports generating passwords with characters chosen from printable ASCII, alphanumeric, and hex characters, as well as a string of random words.

Examples

$ passgen --ascii
|;aeQ;_mLh$7!eLVtm3MUm|068El?<Va>)i=IK#+uv&{gN+}18bNp:BCuq[^,"B~

$ passgen --alpha
g8168URzTJYuxhEjI3LTsoC9tRfwuwhZz4GtRFiJbPh3ZuhNvJs8qaHvb4OxdHL6

$ passgen --hex
4BE6BDA72CB2BB6CC5E163B6209B7489733031C4D150DC013AA4477D26C863C8

$ passgen --digit
4104130170392073625297173179140853172681003693080726492644488275

$ ./passgen --lower
kbwbjothonqxxcwswofxiviasqvgzzemzwcqltfgmvnyljhbshpqerxyenqdxtgo

$ passgen --words
wig.slime.sip.silas.joyce.whelm.rhino.facile.wacky.accrue............

$ passgen --hex -p 5
753924DC422047A0D9FFDDEE87BCF6BA65D992EE317178D1C77BDE46DAC13C42
1ABFFDA08CD24BBD34590D183EE25C610A6B9CCD9847081A786B0061EF312769
2C065D5BD06412C6BE08C47F728D8AB9A099B5C42102517897426D9CF5420DCA
239EDCE8E3788F8E86383411EBA7A3E819F8897C263327AA20503D563E59733B
C2A980F8DFCC686F389B5CB96D30701C22D0B7B6BF2D732F7CD1364D81D949CC

Audit Status

passgen has not yet been subjected to a professional security audit (except by its author, of course). This is being tracked in GitHub Issue #7.