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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>pwgen – Ailyaut's blog</title>
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<h1>pwgen</h1>
<p class="light">Disclaimer 1: this is not <a target="_blank" href="https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/pwgen/pwgen.1.en.html">pwgen</a>, sorry for the confusing name, I will change it.<br>
Disclaimer 2: I wrote this in 2023. What I consider "secure" has changed a lot since then.</p>
<p class="italic">'An easy to use secure password generator.'<br>– me in 2023</p>
<h2>Why?</h2>
<p>In 2022, a site on which I had an account was hacked. A lot of user information was stolen, including email addresses, IP addresses and passwords. Unfortunately I was the kind of person who always uses the same password on all sites, and that password had just been compromised.<br>
The obvious solution would have been to use a password manager, but I wasn't comfortable with the idea that all my passwords would be protected by one single master password.<br>
So I came up with a solution that allows me to always use extremely strong passwords, all unique, without having to memorize anything complicated.</p>
<h2>How does it work?</h2>
<p>The principle is ridiculously simple.</p>
<p>The application just creates a hash of what the user enters with the SHA-1 algorithm. Since the slightest change in input gives a completely different result, it is very easy to create unique passwords. For example, you can start with a very bad password, like “1234”, and then add the name of the service you are creating an account for, like Netflix.</p>
<p>The result of the following input: </p>
<p class="monospace">1234+netflix</p>
<p>will be:</p>
<p class="monospace">84b55c61cb905355057e2995c13ae833ba7d2850</p>
<p>Which is quite strong!</p>
<p>Now let’s say we want to create a password for Gmail.<br>
We can input the following: </p>
<p class="monospace">1234+gmail</p>
<p>which gives us:</p>
<p class="monospace">77b4f11c48a113adf628bf55510d5cbe5af1e15d</p>
<p>A completely different result, even though we started with the same simple password.<br>
Moreover, there is no need to worry about a password being compromised anymore: it is impossible to recover the original input from the hash, so the simple password “1234” can never be guessed by an attacker in order to deduce your other passwords. </p>
<h2>How would I remember such a long password?</h2>
<p>That’s the best part! You don’t!<br>
Each time you need to log into an account, you can launch the app and type your simple password, like “1234+gmail”. The output will be exactly the same as when you first generated it! This is one of the proprieties of a hash: a same input will always give the same output. </p>
<h2>Limitations</h2>
<p class="light">----- 2025 edit start -----</p>
<p>Hashes only use a very limited set of characters (1-9 and a-f), which makes it easier to brute force the password despite the string being 40 characters long if the attacker knows that the password is just a hash.</p>
<p>I am no cryptography expert, but I see two ways of attacking such a password:</p>
<ol>
<li>Guessing the input password using social engineering or other compromised passwords and then hashing it to try it (still more expensive than just trying passwords directly).</li>
<li>Brute forcing the final password directly, knowing that it has only a very limited set of characters.</li>
</ol>
<p>To improve on the current design, I could use each two-character sequence of the hash as a hex code for an ASCII character and create a new string that would be the addition of those ASCII characters.
This way, the password wouldn't look like a hash if it got exposed (so the use of this application wouldn't be as obvious, and the attack #1 wouldn't be attempted),
and it would also be computationally more expensive to try passwords by guessing the input string if there are more steps than just hashing (this would make attack #1 more difficult).
It also solves the problem of attack #2 by using a much wider set of characters.</p>
<p class="light">----- 2025 edit end -----</p>
<h2>Try it!</h2>
<p>You can try the current version for yourself!<br>
I made a GUI application for Android, Windows and Linux (X11) using Godot Engine.<br>
There are also 2 CLI versions in Rust and Golang, because I tried to learn these languages at some point.<br>
I decline any responsibility in case something bad happens with this app. Use it at your own risk.</p>
<p class="light">Downloads will be available later.</p>
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<h3 style="margin-bottom: 0.5em;">My role</h3>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0;">Programming, UI</p>
<h3>Software used</h3>
<p>Godot Engine (for GUI version)</p>
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