kotlas@uncecs.edu (Carolyn M. Kotlas) (06/14/90)
Does anyone know of an MS-DOS utility that will generate random nonsense words of 8 or more characters? I need to come up with a list of words that could be used for passwords on a system that must have the password changed frequently...surely there's some easier way than racking my brain for obscure letter combinations... Thanks for any helpful suggestions! -carolyn -- Carolyn Kotlas (kotlas@uncecs.edu) UNC-Educational Computing Service P. O. Box 12035 2 Davis Drive Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 State Courier #59-01-02 919/549-0671
mvp@hsv3.UUCP (Mike Van Pelt) (06/14/90)
In article <1990Jun13.203416.9343@uncecs.edu> kotlas@uncecs.edu (Carolyn M. Kotlas) writes: >Does anyone know of an MS-DOS utility that will generate random nonsense >words of 8 or more characters? I need to come up with a list of words >that could be used for passwords on a system that must have the >password changed frequently... There was a Unix program posted some time ago for generating words in "alien" languages, based on some rules. It is probably available via FTP from the archives. If you just want random strings of letters, a BASIC program could be written in maybe 5 lines that would do it. BUT.... Doing this for passwords is not a good idea, based on the fact that given a random string of 8 or more characters, the odds are pretty close to certainty that people ARE going to write them down somewhere, no matter how strongly they are urged not to. A better way to do this is probably to do something similar to the Unix V.3 password quality checker: The password must be over a certain length, and must have at least one non-alphabetic character in it. You could also run the attempted password through a spelling checker, and reject any that are real words. -- "A people who expect to be ignorant Mike Van Pelt and free expect what never will, Headland Technology and never can, be." (was: Video Seven) -- Thomas Jefferson ...ames!vsi1!v7fs1!mvp