[pass] Provide symbol set as command line argument

[Brian Candler]

On 11/11/2016 10:05, Henrik Christian Grove wrote:
>> tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' </dev/random |
>> >head -c 32 && echo
>> >
> You're absolutely right, I totally missed that first head which is
> totally unneccessary.

Note that if you pipe /dev/random directly into tr like this, you are 
likely to consume 4KB or more of random data, which will unnecessarily 
deplete your entropy pool, and indeed may block waiting for more 
entropy. It's a highly wasteful approach, as entropy is a valuable 
resource, and this in turn may impact on the performance of other 
cryptographic operations taking place on the machine.

If you are using 'pass' then I suspect you are making passwords to 
copy-paste rather than remember and type. Therefore the benefits of 
having a larger character set are minimal, when you could just have 
longer passwords to achieve the desired level of entropy.

Consider that the base64 set has 64 symbols, and hence 6 bits of entropy 
per character. The set in that 'tr' line has 95 symbols, so has 6.57 
bits of entropy per character.

So to get a password with 96 bits of entropy, you need a 16-character 
base64 password, or a 15-character password from that extended set. I 
don't consider the benefit of saving one character to be worthwhile, 
especially considering the difficulty of locating some of those 
characters on different keyboards, or the fact that many sites may 
reject some of those characters (different sites having their own 
policies as to which characters are acceptable)

A good-quality 96-bit password can be generated consuming the minimum 
amount of system entropy like this (*):

head -c 12 /dev/random | base64

However if you really *do* want to use shorter passwords with more 
symbols, then I think it would be better to use a dedicated external 
program to generate passwords. The shell is *not* a good general-purpose 
programming language.

I think 'pass' should have a simple default, and a configuration setting 
to choose an external password generator.

Regards,

Brian.


(*) Some sites insist that your password *must* include at least one 
upper case, lower case and digit, and occasionally this formula will 
generate a password which doesn't meet those requirements - roughly 1 
time in 15.

p(no digits) = ((64-10)/64)^16 = .0659812552
p(no uppercase) = p(no lowercase) = ((64-26)/64)^16 = .0002385931

However there are only two symbols in the base64 set, so if a site 
requires at least one symbol then you're quite likely to fail.

p(no symbols) = ((64-2)/64)^16 = .6017103034

I find that in practice, passwords generated like this are fine, and if 
very occasionally I have to generate another one, that's not a big deal 
- certainly less work than having to configure a program with the rules 
for a given site.
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