cpass

A minimalist CLI random password generator focusing on convenience and security.

⭐ Features

Convenience

cpass generates passwords the way you would do it for your own convenience.

When generating a password, cpass takes a random lowercase string as a base and then applies modifications like making some letters uppercase, adding digits, or adding special characters.

Security

cpass is coded with a security-first mindset. Upon generating the password, cpass will provide you with a security report containing minimum and maximum entropy bits, and the average of both being the realistic strength of the password.

• Minimum entropy bits assume that the attacker knows that you used this utility specifically while also knowing the exact parameters you supplied.
• Maximum entropy bits also imply that the attacker is aware of you using this utility, but in this case, it is assumed that the attacker supposes that you used random parameters.
• Realistic entropy is the average between both. However, if the attacker doesn't know that this specific utility was used to generate the password, the absolute entropy is going to be higher.

🔒 Security Considerations

Parameter Choice

Please do not copy someone's parameters or reuse existing ones. It's vital to ensure that the parameters are not easy to guess to maximize the security.

💿 Installation

Using Go's go install

Assuming that you have an existing Go installation, you should be able to access the go install command which will build the project from source and put it to $GOPATH/bin directory. By default, $GOPATH is $HOME/go.

You can run the following command to build and install cpass:

go install github.com/AlexSSD7/cpass@latest

After that, you should be able to run cpass, or ~/go/bin/cpass if you have not added ~/go/bin to $PATH.

Package managers

TODO.

Prebuilt binaries

You can find prebuilt binaries in cpass GitHub Releases.

Build from Source

Clone the repository using git and run go build to build the cpass binary.

git clone https://github.com/AlexSSD7/cpass
cd cpass
go build

🔧 Usage

Using cpass is as easy as starting it up. cpass is fully interactive, meaning that there are no command line options to worry about.

Upon the startup, you will be asked to supply the parameters to use when generating the password. Here is an example of how everything is going to look like:

user@pc:~$ cpass
cpass v0.1.0 linux/amd64 go1.21.2. Copyright (c) 2023 The cpass Authors. Distributed under GNU GPL v3, this program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
Password length > 14
Number of uppercase characters to include (ABCDE) > 2 
Number of digit characters to include (01234) > 1
Number of special characters to include (~!@#$) > 1

Generated Password: wrfbajIwy!8Cdy

Entropy (min/realistic/max bits): 64/76/88 (Good)
user@pc:~$

©️ Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2023 The cpass Authors.

Provided under the GNU General Public License v3. The copy of the license is included in the LICENSE file.

Use this git command to view the list of cpass Authors:

git log --format='%aN <%aE>' | sort -uf