I change my passwords every 3 months, but my passphrases are getting kind of stale. The arugment for changing your passphrases is about the same as changing your password. Being lazy (but curious), I went looking for a passphrase generator similar in philosophy to the apg password generator that I’ve been using for a long time.

I didn’t find anything comparable to apg, but I came across a blog post by Curtis Copley describing his algorithm for generating grammatically-correct random passphrases, a neat idea. He provided source code in PL/SQL and Java. Both painful languages for me. How about a Perl translation? Looking at the code, I was discouraged: “This is impossible.”

But then, looking closer at the algorithm: “Hey, maybe not that bad.”

So I coded up a Perl implementation. As far as I can tall, it’s accurate. If you’d like to look, more information and the code is here.

Still haven’t changed my passphrases, though.

One Response to “Grammatically-Correct Random Pass Phrase Generator (in Perl)”

1. Bill Costa says:

   September 8, 2011 at 10:28 am

   This XKCD cartoon is particularly apt for this topic:

   http://xkcd.com/936/

   Perhaps also of interest:

   https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

   for computing the ‘goodness’ of those passphrases.