By George!

Generating secure passwords

I’ve used password managers for many years now, and they have many security benefits, including secure password generation. One pain point is, and always has been, that websites have random rules for what constitutes an “acceptable” password. I’ve ended up with an extremely basic solution: a shell:

tr -cd '!-~' </dev/urandom | head -c 16

That example gives a random password consisting of all printable ASCII characters uniformly. Here’s an example I used recently for a site that only accepted a subset of special characters:

tr -cd 'a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%^&*' </dev/urandom | head -c 16

This doesn’t help with other rules, like “you must include one character of each type” or “you can’t include more than three characters of the same type in a row”, but I can usually just draw a couple times until the conditions are all satisfied.

Other articles

2020 Stewardship Testimonial

Published: Sun 20 September 2020
Updated: Sat 11 February 2023
By George Macon

In UUCA.

This is the text of the Stewardship Testimonial I gave during the service on September 20, 2020.
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A limerick which must be seen

Published: Thu 26 November 2015
Updated: Sat 11 February 2023
By George Macon

In Misc.

You can’t call the British Queen Ms.
Tain’t as nice as Elizabeth is.
But I think that the Queen
Would be even less keen
To have herself mentioned as Ls.

Asimov, Isaac. “Out of Sight”. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec. 1973.

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A Tool to Handle /etc/passwd.pacnew and Friends

Published: Fri 11 July 2014
Updated: Sat 11 February 2023
By George Macon

In Code.

tags: archlinux

The last several times I’ve updated filesystem, .pacnew files were created for /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, and /etc/gshadow. My default approach for merging .pacnew files is to use vimdiff to edit the original and new files simultaneously. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for /etc/passwd and friends because they are databases, not configuration files.
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Liars and Outliers Review

Published: Wed 30 October 2013
Updated: Sat 11 February 2023
By George Macon

In Books.

This is a review of Bruce Schneier’s Liars and Outliers, a book about security. He works from first principles to develop an understanding of what happens today.
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