On passwords, securtiy and real -sweat, blook and tears- life

[A.J. Bonnema]

Joe Barnett wrote:
> A.J. Bonnema wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> A common problem with passwords are their guessabilty (yes, as a 
>> non-native English speaker, I too make up words.....). For instance, 
>> even though I have taught my daughter to not use dictionary words, 
>> names etc, her password for one of the online accounts got hijacked. 
>> What happened was, she used: _____ (five underscores) as a password: 
>> arghghgh.
>>
>> But it did make me think again about the security of my home network. 
>> Unfortunately most passwords are dictionary words, that are easy to 
>> guess using f.i. the john password guesser program, combined with 
>> numbers and if you are lucky a special charactor or two.
>>
 >> <snip>
> 
> apg ("yum install apg" should do the trick I would think) will help 
> generate (relatively?) secure passwords, and by default will generate 
> some that are least somewhat easy to remember though should be very 
> difficult to guess attack.
> 
> Try running it with the following command:
> 
> apg -M SNCL -r /usr/share/dict/words
> 
> which generates output something like this:
> 
> Kam5quon!
> 2FrijibIb]
> er7Oddus`
> Un'blahij1
> tru~Glac2
> 3Odnirs%
> 
> My guess is that any of the above should be reasonably secure and *not 
> too* difficult to remember.
> 

Thanks man, I am going advocate the use of this one to my family members 
and if necessary, force passwords.

I was wondering if I can disable users from changing their own passwords 
(FC5 and XP)?

<snip>
> Good luck,
> 
> Joe
> 

Thanks Joe,

Guus.

-- 
A.J. Bonnema, Leiden The Netherlands,
user #328198 (Linux Counter http://counter.li.org)