pgen

Simple secure random password generator

It uses a cryptographically-secure RNG and tries its best to avoid leaving passwords in memory longer than needed.

Generated passwords are random printable ASCII sequences and are not human-readable.

Defaults

• Default alphabet consists of printable characters except the special characters: only punctuation characters in the alphabet are the underscore and the minus
• Default RNG is ChaCha20

CLI

Provided CLI tool generates passwords that suit most password requirements and provide high security given reasonable length. The generator uses default RNG.

pgen 32

will output something like

oYLlkEX7-PM8yVr2C8FejKnjnqNKmGzw

It is possible to modify the alphabet or require certain rules to be satisfied. For example, if you need a password that includes at least one lowercase (-l), one uppercase (-u), one special character (-s), and one digit (-d) you can use:

pgen 16 -lusd

-c is a shorthand for -lu, so alternative to the above is:

pgen 16 -csd

The order of those flags doesn't matter.

See help (-h|--help) for a full list of options.

Library

Cargo.toml:

pgen = { git = "https://github.com/zelr0x/pgen", tag = "0.3.0" }

Use:

use pgen::{self, ExposeSecret};

The provided library allows to specify a different alphabet or a different generator.

If you generate passwords rarely and are ok with default RNG and alphabet you can do this:

pgen::generate(32);

If you need to generate many passwords repeatedly or if you want to use a different RNG or alphabet, use PassGen with PassGen::new, Passgen::wtih_rng or Passgen::with_alphabet. For example, to create a generator that can be used repeatedly to generate passwords containing only specified characters you can do this:

let p = PassGen::with_alphabet("abc")?;
p.generate(5); // cabac

Rules

It is possible to require the following rules to be satisfied by all generated passwords with the following methods:

• with_special - at least one character from a special set
• with_lower - at least one lowercase character
• with_upper - at least one uppercase character
• with_digit - at least one digit

Default special set includes only underscore and hyphen, other options are:

• SpecialSet::Full for the full set of ASCII special characters
• SpecialSet::Safe for the "safe" set, which includes all special characters except space, backtick, backslash, single and double quotes, pipe, and angle brackets
• SpecialSet::Custom for a custom set