Choosing a highly secure password for your email accounts, social networks, wireless networks and any other applications or websites requires a password became a challenge. So, when you choose a password, think about the possibility of cracking it and how long it will take to crack your password. In this post we will have a look at some tips for choosing a secure and strong passwords as much as possible, and we will check a CLI tool for Linux/Unix will helps you to generate a secure passwords in case you can’t figure one out.
Tips for choosing a secure and strong passwords
- Be the attacker before being attacked. So, think in terms of the attacker, specially if he/she knows you!! It will be really easy to predict the password in case you didn’t apply 2nd step.
- Don’t choose a password includes a family related names or someone close to you.
- Make sure your password includes a capital letters “upper-case” and “lower-case” letters as well. “ABC,abc”.
- Include some symbols or special characters. “`@#*&%$><?{}|”.
- Include numbers as well.
- Always make sure you choose a different password for each account you have.
- Choose a long password, at least 12 characters.
- Wireless Security and some protection methods:
- Most of the available wireless provide these encryption types: WEP, WPA and WPA2. It’s recommended to use a 256bit key which is provided by WPA2 encryptions type.
- By using WPA2 encryption type you will be able to choose a password 8-63 ASCII characters long.
- You can apply the same tips mentioned earlier with WPA2 encryption for your wireless network.
How Pwgen will help you to choose your password?
Pwgen is a simple CLI tool helps you to easily generate unlimited number of secure and strong passwords with a variety of password options.
[How To]: Install Pwgen Password Generator
- Ubuntu
Works on Ubuntu derivatives.
- Fedora
yum install pwgen
- Arch Linux
Pwgen options
| pwgen | Options | Password Length | Number of Passwords |
|---|
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| -c | Include at least one capital letter in the password |
| -A | Don’t include capital letters in the password |
| -n | Include at least one number in the password |
| -0 | Don’t include numbers in the password |
| -y | Include at least one special symbol in the password |
| -s | Generate completely random passwords |
| -B | Don’t include ambiguous characters in the password |
| -h | Help Menu |
Example of using pwgen tool
In this example, I decided to generate 40 passwords with 12 character length long for each, also it includes capital letters and symbols.
Also might want to check this video provided by Mozilla for how to choose a strong passwords?
That’s it for now.
Pwgen source.