Pgen VS diceware

Correct Battery Horse Staple :)

Speaking of which, if you want to generate long memorable passphrases, I have an open source cli tool I wrote for that, which I myself use.

https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen

Give it a spin

This xkcd comic has been instrumental to me.

I wrote a command-line utility a couple of years ago that I use myself regularly to generate secure and memorable passwords

https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen

With this tool you can also see how many bits of entropy the passphrase generation settings you are using will result in.

For example, generating a 5 word password using the long wordlist

    pgen -l -n 5

Around 2011 I set up full disk encryption for the first time. The systems I did this on were some second hand computers that I had bought and installed FreeBSD on. The systems were very stable. Too stable! They were running for several weeks until one day when there was a power outage. I booted the machines and promptly realised that I was not entirely sure about what the convoluted password I had chosen for full disk encryption was exactly.

I lost quite a bit of data that day.

It taught me to stop with silly 5|_|1357:7|_|7:0|\|5 and to use long passphrases instead. This ensures high entropy without the possibility of forgetting symbols chosen, because there are no symbols to remember.

It also taught me to frequently reboot my computers, so that I remember the passphrases to decrypt the disks.

I have a tool that I wrote and which I actively use myself for generating passphrases, it’s called Pgen and it’s open source at https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen

Interesting points and I agree.

Makes me wonder if I should’ve picked a different name for my passphrase generator. I named it “Pgen” and I use it several times per month.

https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen

Perhaps “passblazer” or something would have been a better name :thinking:

Unfortunately, it’s not really possible to rename it at this point :/

Oh well, maybe some other time I can come up with a creative name for a project instead of an overly descriptive name :)

My greatest accomplishments on GitHub are my projects that I actively use myself, and which other people are using as well.

https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen

Pgen is a passphrase generator that uses the EFF wordlists for random passphrases.

A typical passphrase generated with Pgen looks like:

oxford antelope veteran thorn dastardly gem tripod upfront avocado femur moisture sacrifice

Pgen is written in Rust.

Browse my GitHub profile to see some other projects as well, including my “repotools” project which is very basic but super useful and I invoke the repotools commands many times every day.

I also have my zshrc on GitHub, the main selling-point of which is the way I have set up my PS1 prompt. It uses different emojis for different machines and adds some extra white space. The emojis are useful because for a long time I sometimes found it difficult to quickly identify which terminal is logged into which host when I have many terminals open some of which are connected to ssh. Having the host name in the print is nice and all but when you have a handful of terminals open or more it’s not very distinct. Coloured emojis take small space and make each host distinct. Vertical spacing between each command invocation makes it more comfortable to read scroll back and more quick to scan.

My partner and I use Bitwarden. We share many passwords. I'm a PC/Android person and she is stuck in the Apple ecosystem. Bitwarden works well for us, and it's free! I use Diceware to build my easily memorized master password (referenced in the xkcd comic someone else posted): https://diceware.dmuth.org/

The default list is 7,776 words. If you go to https://diceware.dmuth.org/?dice=7 it uses a special list that has 279,936 words. You can see the expanded word list here: https://github.com/dmuth/diceware/blob/main/assets/wordlist/wordlist-7-dice.js