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How can I generate a new random wpa/wap2 key in the linux terminal? I tried pwgen but this is not generating hexadecimal values.

dessert
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ThreeCheeseHigh
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2 Answers2

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For instance, if you want a password with the maximum character length, i.e. 63, you can enter either of the following 2 commands:

  1. makepasswd --chars=63

  2. openssl rand -base64 63

UPDATE:

Here is a better command I've found for this purpose since I first wrote this answer:

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=48 count=1 status=none | base64 | tr +/ -_

Actually I use this zenity-powered script to generate such a password from time to time:

#!/bin/bash
RNDPWD="$(dd if=/dev/urandom bs=48 count=1 status=none | base64 | tr +/ -_)"
echo $RNDPWD | tr -d '\n' | xclip -i -selection clipboard
zenity --question --title="Random Password" --text="<i>Password Copied to Clipboard:</i>\n\n$RNDPWD\n\n<b>Would you like to generate another one?</b>" --width=500 --height=150
if [ $? = 0 ]
then
    "~/.bin/Password-Generator-GUI"
fi
Sadi
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  • thanks for your answer, but I need to generate a 64 characters long, hexadecimal password, which is required by my router. – ThreeCheeseHigh Jan 14 '13 at 14:38
  • then you need `openssl rand -hex 32` – Jean-Marie Jan 15 '13 at 14:58
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    @Sadi: "openssl rand -base64 63" generated 63 bytes of information, 84 base64 characters. – beroal Nov 06 '16 at 19:17
  • @beroal thanks for the feedback. I don't know what happened in nearly 4 years, but I've added another command - even a script - now which I hope will serve this purpose much reliably and much better ( and much longer ;-) – Sadi Nov 08 '16 at 08:54
  • Thanks. And why do you run "tr +/ -_"? – beroal Nov 23 '16 at 11:53
  • @beroal its purpose is to replace any "+" and "/" characters (which, I don't remember now, might create problems in some cases) with "-" and "_" respectively. – Sadi Nov 23 '16 at 14:42
  • @danny Maybe you can accept this as **the answer** now - so that this good website doesn't show some many unanswered questions - although many of them are actually answered ;-) – Sadi Nov 23 '16 at 14:49
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To generate the best possible password (with the highest entropy possible), one should use all of the ASCII printable characters - from 32 (space) to 126 (tilde, ~). This can be archieved with (for an example maximum password length of 63 characters):

< /dev/urandom tr -cd "[:print:]" | head -c 63; echo

To not include the space one can use [:graph:] character set and there are also others described in the tr's manpage.

drws
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