Re: Password generator using a linguistic rule base

Very cute.

There are some nice extensions to this idea, at least one of which gives better passwords using first, second and third order approximations to English. See an especially nice example at Tom Van Vleck's site.

A nice feature of this type of program is that you can develop memorable, but hard to crack passwords for languages besides English, by simply stuffing in an appropriate word list.

Thanks again

-- Anthony Staines

Comment on Re: Password generator using a linguistic rule base

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Re: Re: Password generator using a linguistic rule base by ginseng (Pilgrim) on Aug 02, 2001 at 01:57 UTC
That was the intention, though I didn't comment on it, due to the usual US-centric egotism ;) and the fact that the vowel & consonant arrays aren't broken out to be easily configured. But internationalization was on my mind when I wrote it. (In fact, most of my passwords are based on Hangeul - Korean - words, since that language and culture is of interest to me.) I've briefly reviewed the third-order code on Tom Van Vleck's site - it's definitely an improvement. If I had bothered to research this at all before implementing it, I probably would have either integrated that idea, or decided the problem had already been solved and was becoming more complicated than I felt like dealing with ;) Actually, while I did not know whether it had been done before, I was not so bold as to suppose noone had ever had the idea. (I should have mentioned that in my post. "While I dreamed this program up without knowingly copying someone else's idea, it may have been done before, somewhere.") I just didn't research it at all. (Possibly I was afraid I'd find that some monopoly had a current patent on the method, and I'd be opening myself up to a lawsuit or worse, a DMCA violation and imprisonment, by posting it here ;) Thanks for the link. Maybe some day I'll modify the program to pay attention to frequent neighbors for each letter. Definitely a good idea.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Password generator using a linguistic rule base
by ginseng (Pilgrim) on Aug 02, 2001 at 01:57 UTC

I've briefly reviewed the third-order code on Tom Van Vleck's site - it's definitely an improvement. If I had bothered to research this at all before implementing it, I probably would have either integrated that idea, or decided the problem had already been solved and was becoming more complicated than I felt like dealing with ;)

Actually, while I did not know whether it had been done before, I was not so bold as to suppose noone had ever had the idea. (I should have mentioned that in my post. "While I dreamed this program up without knowingly copying someone else's idea, it may have been done before, somewhere.") I just didn't research it at all. (Possibly I was afraid I'd find that some monopoly had a current patent on the method, and I'd be opening myself up to a lawsuit or worse, a DMCA violation and imprisonment, by posting it here ;)

Thanks for the link. Maybe some day I'll modify the program to pay attention to frequent neighbors for each letter. Definitely a good idea.

[reply]