XKPassword

A password is a key for a lock. The more secure the lock, the more complicated the key would be. The idea of locking things up is to keep them safe from unwanted parties accessing it while you can still easily access it. But is it the case with most password generators? The generated psswords are hard to remember and most of the time you your self are locked out in times of need.

Bjoern Rennhak, the CTO of Orpiva, Skyped me an interesting cartoon, that mentioned about the security of passwords that contain just few words been stronger than those strong passwords generated. I didn't believe it, but the math sure does add up.

Here is a lib that you can use to generate passwords in your Ruby applications or a command line utility which you can use to generate passwords standalone.

While there are some more planned updates over the next few months, this is what I need for my new blog. Thus I will pause development for a while and go back to make my website/blog. If you do have any suggestions, I would be glad to hear. Make an issue and lets talk about it.

Developed in Linux/Ubuntu, this should work fine in a Linux machine. How ever I can't say the same is true with Mac or Windows systems.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'xkpassword'

And then execute:

~# bundle

Or install it yourself as:

~# gem install xkpassword

You can use this app stand-alone in the command line or include it in any of your Ruby applications.

The commandline application accepts the same collection of configuration options as would the XKPassword module would. For more information use xkpassword --help to obtain a full list of options.

~# xkpassword
~# xkpassword --help

require 'xkpassword'

options = {
  max_length: 8,
  min_length: 4,
  separator: '-',
  words: 4,
}

XKPassword.generate(options)

If you are generating multiple passwords at once, I recommend you use the following as then it will only load and parse the databse once.

require 'xkpassword/generator'

options = {
  max_length: 8,
  min_length: 4,
  separator: '-',
  words: 4,
}
  
generator = XKPassword::Generator.new
generator.generate(options)

# 10.times { generator.generate(options) }

I run a policy of tagging any improvement done for the code base. For example, I just bumped a minor (resulting 0.2.3 ~> 0.3.0) for adding Travis CI which doesn't change any functional aspect of the app.

I am thinking of releasing gems only on functional updates (real code changes) that happen with new features and bug fixes. So for now, there will be no 0.3.0v available in Ruby GEMs and the latest would be 0.2.3.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Some of the things I am interested in doing in the near future.

• More tests, didn't have the time to write it all
• Local configuration file -> ex: ~/.xkpassword
• Check for a better dictionary
• Ability to provide a dictionary (this should help languages other than English)
• A black-list - words that will not show up in the generation

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/xkpassword. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.