Create random passwords with OpenSSL/LibreSSL

Random Passwords Generation As system administrators, we know we sometimes have to create passwords. It might be for ourselves, or when creating them for colleagues and customers. For an easy and quick way of generating random passwords, we can use the OpenSSL utility, part of OpenSSL and LibreSSL. This toolkit is often already installed on systems running Linux. OpenSSL has a randomize function. If we feed the output through the base64 function, the scrambled set of characters can be made more […]

shadow file

Password Security on Linux Using the /etc/shadow file Linux systems use a password file to store accounts, commonly available as /etc/passwd. For additional safety measures, a shadow copy of this file is used which includes the passwords of your users. Or actually hashed password, for maximum security. An example of a password entry in /etc/shadow may look like this: user1:$6$6Y/fI1nx$zQJj6AH9asTNfhxV7NoVgxByJyE.rVKK6tKXiOGNCfWBsrTGY7wtC6Cep6co9eVNkRFrpK6koXs1NU3AZQF8v/:16092:0:99999:7::: For proper display, let’s split this up in several fields: user1 $6$6Y/fI1nx$zQJj6AH9asTNfhxV7NoVgxByJyE.rVKK6tK<truncated> 16092 0 99999 7 <nothing> <nothing> Field explanations […]