This is PawGen, a password generation library capable of creating Anglophone phonemic, Kana-based phonemic, and structureless passwords.

PawGen is implemented in pure Ruby.

A command line tool is included, too.

Sample usage

require 'pawgen'

pwgen = PawGen.new.
    set_length!(16).
    include_symbols!.
    no_uppercase!.
    exclude_ambiguous!

10.times do
  puts pwgen.anglophonemic
end

Classes and methods

The core class is called [[PawGen]]; it encapsulates the password generation options. A set of (more or less) reasonable defaults is provided. Optionally after manipulating the options within, calling [[PawGen#generate]] will generate a random password, with entropy derived from

[SecureRandom::random_number]], and return it as a [[String]

object. Alternatively, you may call the generation method – [[PawGen#random]], [[PawGen#anglophonemic]], or

[PawGen#kanaphonemic]

– directly.

Constructor

The constructor [[PawGen::new]] takes no arguments and returns a password generator of default options.

Options

• Whether to include uppercase letters:

  • [include_uppercase!]

    requires at least one;

  • [no_uppercase!]

    prohibits all;

  • [include_uppercase?]

    queries the current status.

• Whether to include digits:

  • [include_digits!]

    requires at least one;

  • [no_digits!]

    prohibits all;

  • [include_digits?]

    queries the current status.

• Whether to include non-letter non-digit printable ASCII characters:

  • [include_symbols!]

    requires at least one;

  • [no_symbols!]

    prohibits all;

    characters in them.

  • [include_symbols?]

    queries the current status.

• Whether to permit letters or digits that may be easily confused with each other:

  • [exclude_ambiguous!]

    prohibits all;

  • [do_not_exclude_ambiguous!]

    or [[dont_exclude_ambiguous!]]

    permits them;

  • [exclude_ambiguous?]

    queries the current status.

• Whether to permit vowels (note that only the [[random]] generator supports generating vowel-less passwords):

  • [exclude_vowels!]

    prohibits all;

  • [do_not_exclude_vowels!]

    or [[dont_exclude_vowels!]]

    permits them;

  • [exclude_vowels?]

    queries the current status.

• How long a password should be:

  • [set_length!(length)]

    sets the expected password length

    and return the [[PawGen]] instance for method call chaining;

  • [length=(length)]

    sets the expected password length and

    returns it, as expected from assignment operators;

  • [length]

    queries the current status.

• Which generator should be invoked when [[generate]] is called:

  • [use_structureless_generator!]

    uses [[structureless]],

    which picks each permitted character at equal probability for each position. This is the only generator able to generate passwords when vowel exclusion is required.

  • [use_anglophonemic_generator!]

    uses [[anglophonemic]],

    which roughly follows Anglophone syllable model in generating passwords pronounceable to English speakers. This generator is only able to generate passwords of 5 characters or more.

  • [use_kanaphonemic_generator!]

    uses [[kanaphonemic]], which

    roughly follows the Japanese mora model. Such passwords may also be more convenient than Anglophone phonemic passwords for speakers of languages such as Estonian, Hawaiian, and Russian.

The generators can also be called directly.

Copyright, credits, and licensing

PawGen is copyright © 2007-2014 by Andres Soolo.

PawGen is strongly inspired by (and includes the Anglophone phoneme table from) pwgen.

pwgen is copyright © 2001-2006 by Theodore Ts’o who used C and released the work under the GNU GPL v2.

The kanaphonemic password generator is inspired by an unnamed Estonian language friendly phonemic password generator written by Andres Soolo and Tõnis Kevvai in Python as a part of the HotDog web application server in 2001.

HotDog is copyright © 2001-2014 by AS Eesti Telekom (formerly AS Elion, formerly formerly AS Eesti Telefon) who have released the work under the BSD license.

PawGen is probably sufficiently different from its predecessors to qualify as an unrelated work under most countries’ copyright laws. Nevertheless, following the GPL’s spirit, PawGen is hereby published as free software under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License version 2 or (at your option) any later version.