rsanders/correct-horse-battery-staple

= chbs

http://github.com/rsanders/correct-horse-battery-staple

== DESCRIPTION:

Generate a 4 word password from words of size 3-8 characters, with frequencies in the 30th-60th percentile. This range gives a nice set of uncommon but not completely alien words.

$ chbs generate --verbose -W 3..8 -P 30..60
Corpus size: 6396 candidate words of 33075 total
Entropy: 48 bits (2^48 = 281474976710656)
Years to guess at 1000 guesses/sec: 8926
magnate-thermal-sandbank-augur

With the --verbose flag, the utility will calculate a time-to-guess based on a completely arbitrary 1000 guesses/sec. If you'd like a more secure password, either relax the various filtering rules (-W and -P), add more words to the password, or use a larger corpus.

By default we use the American TV Shows & Scripts corpus taken from Wiktionary.

Others provided:

Project Gutenberg 2005 corpus taken from Wiktionary.
1 of every 7 of the top 60000 lemmas from wordfrequency.info (6900 actual lemmas after processing)

See http://xkcd.com/936/ for the genesis of the idea.

Data sources:

 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists
 http://wordfrequency.info/

== FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

Generates pretty decent XKCD-style passwords using pretty simple logic
Meant to be a proof-of-concept, and succeeds at that.

Not so good:

Corpus loading is slow and memory-hungry
Needs a good corpus abstraction beyond serialized arrays/objects loaded from CSV/JSON/Marshal
Should probably store default filter params per-corpus (e.g., 30-70 percentile works great for one corpus, badly for another)
Probably needs a ~/.correct-horse-battery-staple file to set defaults

== SYNOPSIS:

Command line usage, for a password of 4 words (default), each word of length between 3-8 letters, taken from the 30th through the 60th percentile range of the corpus sorted by word frequency from least to most frequent:

$ chbs generate --verbose -W 3..8 -P 30..60

Corpus size: 6396 candidate words of 33075 total
Entropy: 48 bits (2^48 = 281474976710656)
Years to guess at 1000 guesses/sec: 8926
magnate-thermal-sandbank-augur

The 'chbs' command line program is the best reference for usage of the underlying library. This would be a minimal version:

require 'correct_horse_battery_staple'
corpus    = CorrectHorseBatteryStaple.default_corpus
generator = CorrectHorseBatteryStaple::Generator.new(corpus)
puts generator.make(4)

== REQUIREMENTS:

Ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.x, or (approximately) JRuby 1.5.x or later.

== INSTALL:

Just "gem install" and use the "chbs" wrapper program.

== DEVELOPERS:

After checking out the source, run:

$ rake newb

This task will install any missing dependencies, run the tests/specs, and generate the RDoc.

== LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

rsanders / correct-horse-battery-staple

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