Data::Pwgen - simple password generation and assessment
use Data::Pwgen qw(pwgen pwstrength); my $pass = pwgen(12); my $str = pwstrength($pass);
This is a simple module that implements generation and assesment of secure passwords.
Generate a password with the (optional) given length and (also optional) given character class. The default length is 16. If specified, the character class must be one of the following:
Lower-case letters.
Upper-case letters.
Lower- and upper-case letters.
The digits 0 through 9.
The following characters: % $ _ - + * & / = ! #
Lower- and upper-case letters and digits.
alphanum plus signs.
If you pass anything other than one of the above, it will fall back to the default, which is alphanum.
Returns a numeric rating of the quality of the supplied (password) string.
An alias for pwstrength(), retained for backwards compatibility. At some point this alias will go away.
The following modules provide similar capabilities: App::Genpass, Crypt::GeneratePassword, String::Random, Data::Random, String::MkPasswd.
http://neilb.org/reviews/passwords.html: a review of CPAN modules for generating passwords.
There are many modules for generating random strings or passwords.
This section explains my reason for writing this module and why you wouldn't want to use it in some cases.
Use this module if you need code which is easy to comprehend and review.
Use this module if you do not have strict constraints on cryptographic security and you don't need passwords/strings which are easy to remember.
These strings are made to be used by machines, not for humans.
This module is rather fast. It doesn't use fancy tricks to cut the time, but the approach used for generating the passwords is simple and thus this module won't block for a long time.
The runtime complexity is about O(n*m) where n is the length of the chosen character class and m is the requested length of the password.
If you need either pronounceable password or have high requirements for the cryptographic properties of the generated strings you should not use this module. In this case please have a look at those listed above or Neils' great review.
When looking for suiteable modules on CPAN I found that those present were either unmaintained, had a very bad worst-case runtime or were completely unreadable.
Please not that this code was written some time ago for use in VBoxAdm some time ago, but refactored and released on its own just now.
Dominik Schulz <dominik.schulz@gauner.org>
This software is copyright (c) 2012 by Dominik Schulz.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
To install Data::Pwgen, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Data::Pwgen
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Data::Pwgen
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.