In my previous blogpost I talked about the true random number generator (TRNG) within the Raspberry Pi. Now I am using it for a small online pre-shared key (PSK) generator at https://random.weberlab.de (IPv6-only) that you can use e.g. for site-to-site VPNs. Here are some details how I am reading the binary random data and how I built this small website.
Unpredictable random numbers are mandatory for cryptographic operations in many cases (ref). There are cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators (CSPRNG) but the usage of a hardware random number generator (TRNG) is something I am especially interested in since many years. While there are many proprietary TRNGs (list) with different prices, I had a look at two cheap solutions: the Raspberry Pi’s hardware random number generator as well as an application that uses a DVB-T/RTL/SDR stick for gathering some noise.
I have tested both of them with various options and ran them against the dieharder test suite. In this post I am listing the CLI commands to get the random data from those source and I am listing the results of the tests.
If you want to create random passphrases based on certain wordlists, a tool that generates these passphrases should be used rather than generating them yourself. Here comes an introduction to four different methods of creating such random passphrases.
This is a mathematical post which is related to the xkcd 936 comic about password strength. The central question is: What is better for passwords? A password containing a few random characters or a passphrase containing a (less) few random words? Here comes a mathematical discussion.
Continue reading Password Strength/Entropy: Characters vs. Words
This is a short post in which I show the options I am using when generating random passwords with the Password Generator that ships with the password safe KeePass. The character set should be as big as possible while not containing letters that could confuse the end-user. Of course, all upper- & lower-case alphabetic characters as well as the digits are included. For all other symbols, I chose those which are inside the ASCII table as well as writeable with the keyboard layouts for US and German keyboards.