Readme - spass

Secure password/passphrase generator.

Authors

• Author: Guy Rutenberg
• Word list by Arnold G. Reinhold

Usage

By default spass will generate passwords. You can control the length using the -l modifier. Examples:

$ spass
mqGP0GEZ
$ ./spass -l 10
@-9Me6VNnT

If you pass the -p modifier, spass will output a passphrase instead of a password:

$ ./spass -p -l 4
pecan suey faith signor

For more options see spass --help.

Installation

Dependencies

• CMake-2.8
• PortAudio
• libasound2-dev
• libboost-program-options-dev
• qtbase5-dev

Linux

Just run:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Or use one of the provided binary packages.

Windows

Compiling Boost and PortAudio from source is easy. PortAudio uses CMake (just generate and compile), and compiling boost is a matter of: bootstrap and .\b2.

If you use Visual Studio Express 2012, you may need to set the Boost_COMPILER variable in CMake to -vc110, else it won't be detected properly.

In order to select the right Qt installation, set QT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE to point to the correct path to qmake.exe. CMake will use it to infer the rest of the paths.

Due to a bug in CMake (actually a regression) setting the SubSystem doesn't work as it should. It should be set manually in the Project Properties->Linker->System to "Windows" (at least for release).

Configuration

cmake can receive the following options:

WITH_PORTAUDIO          use PortAudio as the audio backend instead of ALSA
                        [default=OFF]
WITH_OSS                use Open Sound System (OSS) as the audio backend
                        instead of ALSA [default=OFF]
WITH_ALSA               use Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) as the
                        audio backend [default=ON]
WITH_GUI                Build the graphical frontend [default=ON]

The options are exclusive, e.g. only one of them can be used each time. If no option is provided, the ALSA is used.

Security

The security of a password generator like spass, is determined by the quality of its underlying random number generator. spass employs a true random number generator based on noise obtained via the microphone. The noise goes through an unbiasing phase and then every 512 bits are compressed into 128 bits using a hash function. After those two phases the output bits should have full entropy.

See also Audio Based True Random Number Generator POC.

The words for the passphrases are taken from a list containing 8192 w