3 ms·
pwgen 1. Focuses on memorable passwords, and restricts itself to fewer ASCII characters than rpg. 2. Makes no attempt to preserve entropy; waste of entropy is
by ankitpati 9y ago
pwgen
1. Focuses on memorable passwords, and restricts itself to fewer ASCII characters than rpg.
2. Makes no attempt to preserve entropy; waste of entropy is potentially unbounded. This is a performance concern when reading from /dev/random, and a security concern when reading from /dev/urandom.
3. Has large source code spread across multiple files. Good for reusability of components, not so good for auditability and security.
4. Requires Perl and sed.
- stephenr 9y ago1. That's what the `-s|--secure` flag is for 3. Is 1000 lines in 6 files really "large"? 4. On Debian at least, it just requires Libc.
- ankitpati 9y ago1. Sorry, didn't know about that. Just took a cursory glance through the source code. 3. 126 lines in 1 file is still an order of magnitude smaller. 4. The source has a Perl and a sed script, although they are not used in the password generation. (2) is still a concern, especially on servers and embedded computers.