Is pwgen really random?

[Craig McPherson]

I've been playing around with pwgen and I notice I often get two passwords in a row that start with the same sequence of characters:

mixooba
mixisha
(skip 1)
cheyaun
chooqu
(skip 1)
xiiraeg
xiyitoo

Eight passwords in a row containing three pairs of similar passwords. Coincidence, or poor randomness?

BTW, I've seen pwgen to put to many other productive uses as well, like generating random names for fantasy roleplaying games. A very versatile program. Theehothaepaholoo, imohoorej voiquothi.

[bdg1983]

Yes, pwgen is lovely. That's how I got my current name :)

[X_console]

Wasn't there something on Bugtraq about that a few months ago? I seem to remember it was RedHat related though... maybe it's a different program.

[Craig McPherson]

Oh, wow.

I just typed "pwgen 6", and the "random" password it spat out was the first initial and middle name of this female I had a mad crush on in high school.

That was just weird.

The odds of pwgen generating the first initial and middle name of a particular person with a 5-digit middle name is 308915776 to 1. Assuming I know maybe 30 people who have 5-digit middle names (that I know of), the odds of pwgen producing the first initial and middle name of any of them is still about 10297192 to 1 against.

I know, randomness being what it is, that given a large enough time to run, pwgen will spit out the name of EVERYBODY's first love (unless your first love's name is a dictionary word, in which case pwgen will throw it out), but I only ran it 3 or 4 times. Pretty unlikely.

It's either a very rare coincidence, or a sign.

[bdg1983]

Lottery card time? ;)

[Craig McPherson]

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