Default Easy Password

Setting default passwordsas you’ve suggested is pretty insecure. If it was done like that there’s only a small (in relative terms) amount of possible passwords that would be available, so cracking them would be trivial these days.

The symbols are there for a reason – they do make password harder, both to crack and to remember.

And to be honest, if someone that’s smart enough to get a dotorate cant figure out how to update their password through a few basic links, there’s more problems then just usability.

But, if you do need easier passwords, the best idea is to create the accounts manually. That way you can set whatever passwords you want to.

There’s a good idea for strong but memorable passwords in the XKCD comic at https://xkcd.com/936/

I’ve put together a simple plugin to filter the replace the default random password generator with a XKCD style password generator using the server’s dictionary words list.

This plugin needs a readme & some additional testing before I submit it to the plugins directory, but it should work on most *nix systems

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: XKCD Passwords
Plugin URI: https://cubecolour.co.uk
Description: Generates new passwords using XKCD 'four random words'
Author: cubecolour
Version: 1.0.0
Author URI: https://cubecolour.co.uk
Text Domain: xkcd-password

Licence: GPL
props to:
XKCD: https://xkcd.com/936/
bendiy: https://gist.github.com/bendiy/5688443
*/

if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) exit;

function cc_xkcd_password_generator() {
	$lines = file('/usr/share/dict/words', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES);
	$length = count($lines);
	$password = '';
	for ($i = 1; $i <= 4; $i++) {
		$plain = FALSE;
		while (!$plain) {
			// Get random word from $lines
			$key = mt_rand(0, $length);
			if ((preg_match("/^[a-z]+$/", $lines[$key]) == 1) && (strlen($lines[$key]) < 9)) {
				//* String only contains a to z characters
				$plain = TRUE;
				$password = $password . $lines[$key];
				//* Add hyphen between words
				if ($i != 4 ){
					$password = $password . '-';
				}
			}
		}
	}
	return $password;
}
add_filter( 'random_password', 'cc_xkcd_password_generator' );

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by cubecolour.