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Password Generator

beta.browxy.com

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Re: Password Generator

#11

Post by pabletec »

pvg wrote: post #8
aarreedd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a great site or anything and you're right that password should be generated client-side. But not everyone is one Linux or Mac and sometimes it's just easier to Google "password generator" than remembering that command. Your comment reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Password managers and browsers themselves can generate passwords. Generating passwords with a website it a terrible idea, googling "password generator" and going to some random website is an even worse variant of the same idea.

this is not a random website, this is "the browxy" site

Re: Password Generator

#12

Post by oefrha »

TheDong wrote: post #9
aarreedd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a great site or anything and you're right that password should be generated client-side. But not everyone is one Linux or Mac and sometimes it's just easier to Google "password generator" than remembering that command. Your comment reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

There are plenty of actually secure and usable password generators, such as the one integrated with keepass / 1password / etc. I'm sure there are secure websites to do it too. This isn't it though. The dropbox comment isn't relevant. It's a bias to say "I remember this thing was criticized in a similar way but succeeded" and map that on to "so other criticisms aren't valid". It's far more often than things seem unlik…

> there are secure websites to do it too.

Such websites have to be audited every single time you use it. Even if I only have a web browser and nothing else I would combine random.org and diceware.com instead of trusting some website.

Re: Password Generator

#13

Post by iudqnolq »

TheDong wrote: post #2

This generates the password on a server you don't control. I recommend not using it. Using 'tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c $length' is more secure and available on your linux or osx machine even more easily than waiting a second for a server to run some java off in a magic black box.

You can also try indexing into /usr/share/dict/words for a correcthorsebatterystaple-style password. I'm sure there's a cute on-liner, I did it in Python because that took a lot less time than all the man page searching how to do it with Unix text processing tools would have taken.

Yes, it would be better to remember random characters of the same length. But most people don't. I personally have one password I use to sign into 1password and a small other set of critical services, and longer random passwords for everything else. I personally don't worry about nation state adversaries so I can make myself less vulnerable to mass automated attacks and targeted attacks by non-experts. It's important to remember not to let perfect be the enemy of the good, and important not to discount the cost of DOSing yourself. I reduced my security after I lost access to something of value.

Re: Password Generator

#14

Post by TheDong »

pabletec wrote: post #11
pvg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Password managers and browsers themselves can generate passwords. Generating passwords with a website it a terrible idea, googling "password generator" and going to some random website is an even worse variant of the same idea.

this is not a random website, this is "the browxy" site

I find it bizarre that you have exactly 3 comments in 5 years, all of which are on dbremmen's posts, who happens to be the creator of browxy [0].

Forgive me if I don't trust my password generation on the servers of someone who is either sock-puppeting, or having a friend do something that does not look all that different.

Even if I trust the person who runs the browxy website and servers, I don't trust my password generation to a multi-tenet environment. Browxy is running this code in docker containers on a machine with many other docker containers running arbitrary user-submitted code. The intel vulnerabilities over the past year or so have made it incredibly clear that running sensitive code on the same CPU as totally untrusted and possibly malicious code is a dangerous proposition and there are numerous potential side channels to exfiltrate data.

Trusting password generation to a website that generates passwords on a shared machine is even worse than the usual password generation website which at least uses javascript/securerandom to do it on my CPU.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11719439

Re: Password Generator

#15

Post by archgoon »

iudqnolq wrote: post #13
TheDong wrote: post #2

This generates the password on a server you don't control. I recommend not using it. Using 'tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c $length' is more secure and available on your linux or osx machine even more easily than waiting a second for a server to run some java off in a magic black box.

You can also try indexing into /usr/share/dict/words for a correcthorsebatterystaple-style password. I'm sure there's a cute on-liner, I did it in Python because that took a lot less time than all the man page searching how to do it with Unix text processing tools would have taken. Yes, it would be better to remember random characters of the same length. But most people don't. I personally have one password I use to…

shuf -n 4 /usr/share/dict/words | tr '\n' ' ' && echo

Re: Password Generator

#16

Post by TheDong »

iudqnolq wrote: post #13
TheDong wrote: post #2

This generates the password on a server you don't control. I recommend not using it. Using 'tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c $length' is more secure and available on your linux or osx machine even more easily than waiting a second for a server to run some java off in a magic black box.

You can also try indexing into /usr/share/dict/words for a correcthorsebatterystaple-style password. I'm sure there's a cute on-liner, I did it in Python because that took a lot less time than all the man page searching how to do it with Unix text processing tools would have taken. Yes, it would be better to remember random characters of the same length. But most people don't. I personally have one password I use to…

Your cute one-liner for 4 words:

sort --random-sort /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 4 | tr -d '\n'

You may wish to omit words that have "'" characters, in which case you may throw in a grep -v "'" after the sort.

Re: Password Generator

#17

Post by oefrha »

TheDong wrote: post #14
pabletec wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is not a random website, this is "the browxy" site

I find it bizarre that you have exactly 3 comments in 5 years, all of which are on dbremmen's posts, who happens to be the creator of browxy [0]. Forgive me if I don't trust my password generation on the servers of someone who is either sock-puppeting, or having a friend do something that does not look all that different. Even if I trust the person who runs the browxy website and servers, I don't trust my password ge…

If you look at submissions of these two accounts it’s even worse.

Re: Password Generator

#18

Post by iudqnolq »

archgoon wrote: post #15
iudqnolq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also try indexing into /usr/share/dict/words for a correcthorsebatterystaple-style password. I'm sure there's a cute on-liner, I did it in Python because that took a lot less time than all the man page searching how to do it with Unix text processing tools would have taken. Yes, it would be better to remember random characters of the same length. But most people don't. I personally have one password I use to…

shuf -n 4 /usr/share/dict/words | tr '\n' ' ' && echo

Thanks! I'm trying to learn bash, and it's going slow (right now still trying to fully understand set -euxo pipefail). I would not have guessed that a command existed to make random permutations, I was expecting an awk incantation.

Re: Password Generator

#19

Post by iudqnolq »

TheDong wrote: post #16
iudqnolq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also try indexing into /usr/share/dict/words for a correcthorsebatterystaple-style password. I'm sure there's a cute on-liner, I did it in Python because that took a lot less time than all the man page searching how to do it with Unix text processing tools would have taken. Yes, it would be better to remember random characters of the same length. But most people don't. I personally have one password I use to…

Your cute one-liner for 4 words: sort --random-sort /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 4 | tr -d '\n' You may wish to omit words that have "'" characters, in which case you may throw in a grep -v "'" after the sort.

Thank you. I think it's a testament to the power of unix that two different people responded with solutions using different commands. I should have thought of sort, it feels natural in retrospect. Am I right in believing bash pipes are lazy enough that that won't require sorting the whole file, just pulling out four random lines?

As a side note, I'm guessing grep had -v before it became a standard for verbose? That's one of the hardest parts: it seems open source tools never change UI to help new users at the expense of old ones having to change workflows. A valid way of doing it, and as someone who's never contributed to anything open source I have no place to criticize. Just saying makes it harder. (And I'm realizing I haven't used any closed source software from a comprable time, so I have no idea if this is FOSS-specific)

Re: Password Generator

#20

Post by oeuviz »

oefrha wrote: post #10
oeuviz wrote: post #4

I created something similar ~2 decades ago in perl. It would spit out a long list of passwords in text format so you could chose one without the server knowing what you chose. Today, keepass does the job just fine.

Instead of a search space of 1 you augmented it to N which is likely <= 2^10. Still a pretty terrible idea to trust a password like that.

I agree, however, it ran on our own server so it was OK-ish.
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