I am trying to generate a random password that contains special chars using ruby. I would like to know if there is a standard for generating such passwords. I have considered using a weighted probability distribution and assigning weights such that there is a higher probability of picking special chars from , but I am not sure if this is a widely-accepted standard.
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What has your research told you? Currently your question is asking us to recommend solutions or pages. Please read "How to Ask" including the linked pages.the Tin Man– the Tin Man2016-09-07 18:21:22 +00:00Commented Sep 7, 2016 at 18:21
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4 Answers
Ruby comes with just such a module SecureRandom. You can generate random strings:
require "securerandom"
SecureRandom.hex 1 # => "e1"
SecureRandom.hex 2 # => "dcdd"
SecureRandom.hex 3 # => "93edc6"
SecureRandom.hex 5 # => "01bf5657ce"
SecureRandom.hex 8 # => "3cc72f70146ea286"
SecureRandom.base64 2 # => "d5M="
SecureRandom.base64 3 # => "EJ1K"
SecureRandom.base64 5 # => "pEeGO68="
SecureRandom.base64 8 # => "muRa+tO0RqU="
SecureRandom.base64 13 # => "1f8y7xsvaCEw0hwkjg=="
There is now a cryptographically secure version of the above called SysRandom which some people are recommending.
With the gem simple-password-gen You can also generate random and pronounceable passwords:
require "simple-password-gen"
Password.random 8 # => "#TFJ)Vtz3"
Password.pronounceable 13 # => "vingastusystaqu"
Finally, and just for fun (I recommend SysRandom), I wrote a small gem a while back to generate random strings based on template strings. Although it doesn't include special chars, it would be a trivial addition. Feel free to submit an issue for it if it interests you.
Comments
You can use SecureRandom (docs):
require 'securerandom'
password = SecureRandom.base64(15)
# => "vkVuWvPUWSMcZf9nn/dO"
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Jimbali
This will generate strings with a special character only 46.875% of the time. There is a 2/64 chance that the character will be a
+ or a /, which multiplied by 15 is 0.46875.The ruby's built-in SecureRandom module has convenient methods since ruby 2.5.
require "securerandom"
# If you need A-Za-z0-9
SecureRandom.alphanumeric(10)
# If you want to specify characters (excluding similar characters)
# However, this method is NOT PUBLIC and it might be changed someday.
SecureRandom.send(:choose, [*'A'..'Z', *'a'..'z', *'0'..'9'] - ['I', 'l', '1', 'O', '0'], 10)
# Old ruby compatible version
chars = [*'A'..'Z', *'a'..'z', *'0'..'9']
10.times.map { chars[SecureRandom.random_number(chars.length)] }.join
Comments
The easiest way is by using the string_pattern gem https://github.com/MarioRuiz/string_pattern
This will generate 1000 unique strings from 6 to 20 characters including letters, and force to include special characters and numbers
require 'string_pattern'
1000.times {
puts :"6-20:L/$N/&".gen
}
