A different take on generating random passwords - Let me explain...
I found myself, or the person I was on the phone with...
Struggling to locate, on their keyboards, most of the special characters used by password generators.
I've also had many an eyeroll, talking to someone who got a temporary password emailed to them, but they could not tell the difference between: O and 0, or l, I, and 1... (see comments in the script), and ended up locking their account, thus having to call me, to tell me the password I sent does not work - (queue 'eyeroll')
The below script, just gets rid of those problematic characters.
Making it ~ MUCH EASIER TO COMMUNICATE ~ a random password
I use THIS to create passwords, now.
And it tests for AD password complexity too... (see comments in the script)
- Tell it how long the password should be (15 is the max length, but you can add to the 'PWDgen' function... Though, that'd be kinda' mean.)
- Tell it how many passwords to generate...
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$Length = 8 # How many characters long (max is 15).
$HowMany = 6 # So you can pick from an assortment.
############## password generator - Some characters removed:
# '1' (number one), 'I' (letter 'eye' upper case), and 'l'
(letter 'el' lower case) - look to similar
# '0' (number zero), and 'O' (letter 'oh', uppercase) - look
to similar
# Special characters that are ambiguous, less common,
difficult to explain on the phone, or harder to locate on the keyboard.
# AD standard password complexity:
# One character from
at least three, of these four categories: Upper Alpha, Lower alpha, Number,
Special character.
Function SpecChar {("!@#$%&".tochararray())
| Get-Random}
Function UpperAlpha {("ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ".tochararray()) | Get-Random}
Function LowerAlpha {("abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz".tochararray()) | Get-Random}
Function Number
{("23456789".tochararray()) | Get-Random}
Function WildCard {("!@#$%&23456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz".tochararray()) | Get-Random}
Function PWDgen
{
$Password =
((
(SpecChar)+(SpecChar)+(SpecChar)+`
(Number)+(Number)+(Number) +`
(UpperAlpha)+(UpperAlpha)+(UpperAlpha)+`
(LowerAlpha)+(LowerAlpha)+(LowerAlpha)+`
(WildCard)+(WildCard)+(WildCard)).tochararray()
| sort
{Get-Random})[0..($Length - 1)] -join ''
Return $Password
}
Write-Host "Here's a bunch of random, $Length character
passwords:" -ForegroundColor Cyan
$Counter = 1
1..$HowMany | % {
Write-Host "$($Counter): "
Do
{$Password00 = PWDgen # Force AD password complexity compliance - At least three
out of four
$Rule = 0
If
(($Password00 -cmatch "[A-Z]")) {$Rule++}
If
(($Password00 -cmatch "[a-z]")) {$Rule++}
If
(($Password00 -match ".*\d+.*")) {$Rule++}
If
(($Password00 -match '[^a-zA-Z.*\d+.*]')) {$Rule++}
} Until
($Rule -ge 3)
Write-Host $($Password00) -ForegroundColor Yellow
$Counter++
}
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