3 ms·
It is unfortunate that Mozilla does this without telling the user that you need a good password (or better, generating one for you), but you can just use a good
by joveian 9y ago
It is unfortunate that Mozilla does this without telling the user that you need a good password (or better, generating one for you), but you can just use a good password. 21 random base 64 characters is almost the strength of the 128-bit encryption. You can memorize it easily by writing it down (divide into three groups of seven) and entering it from the paper for two or three weeks. The trick is to try never to get it wrong (you will occasionally anyway, but try not to guess - the right answer eventually come to mind effortlessly before you look at the paper, which should be turned to not normally be visible). On linux, you can use `base64 < /dev/urandom` (or `tr -dc "[:graph:]" < /dev/urandom` which picks from a few more characters) to get the password.
- kerkeslager 9y agoI prefer to use Diceware[1] as I find these passwords easier to memorize. But for a master password it doesn't matter as much since you only have to memorize it once. If you're generating passwords from urandom, you can do this slightly nicer with: head /dev/urandom | LC_ALL=C tr -dc "[:graph:]" | head -c 21 A few things about this: 1. In case it's not obvious, 21 is the number of characters this will generate. Change that to generate more or fewer characters. 2. LC_ALL=C isn't necessary on some systems, but it's necessary on Mac OS and some others where `tr` expects UTF-8 encoded input on Mac OS unless that is overridden by the environment variable. 3. If you are generating a password for one of those dumb systems that restricts which characters you can use, you can change `"[:graph:]"` to something like `'A-Za-z0-9~!@#$%^&*_='` depending on which characters are allowed. [1] http://world.std.com/%7Ereinhold/diceware.html http://world.std.com/%7Ereinhold/diceware.html