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These are blog entries written by the UNIX Health Check development team. Our team has extensive technical experience on both AIX and Red Hat systems, and we like to share our knowledge with our visitors.

Topics: Red Hat / Linux, Security

Generating random passwords

A way to create a random password yourself is using a password generator. The pwmake is a command-line tool for generating random passwords that consist of all four groups of characters: uppercase, lowercase, digits and special characters.

The utility allows you to specify the number of entropy bits that are used to generate the password. The entropy is pulled from /dev/urandom. The minimum number of bits you can specify is 56, which is enough for passwords on systems and services where brute force attacks are rare. 64 bits is adequate for applications where the attacker does not have direct access to the password hash file (/etc/shadow). For situations when the attacker might obtain the direct access to the password hash or the password is used as an encryption key, 80 to 128 bits should be used. If you specify an invalid number of entropy bits, pwmake will use the default of bits.

To create a password of 128 bits, enter the following command: 

# pwmake 128
*oLhezv@Hal7YmUM;Igqilur0N&




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