Pwgen plug-in

Author: Cventers (talk, contrib)

Pwgen Plugin by Chase Venters, Public Domain

Links

Download v0.01:
Pwgen-001.zip (11 KB) ZIP contains binary, source, documentation, example

Discussion:
Forum thread

Description

The random number facilities already available for NSIS do not generate good entropy. If these facilities are used to generate passwords (as an installer might do when setting up a user account to run a service), the passwords they generate will be very predictable.

But Microsoft provides the CryptoAPI in Windows, which we can use to collect crypto-grade entropy from the operating system. This plugin exports just one API call, which can be used to generate a password of arbitrary length (1 to 255 characters) using secure entropy provided to us by the OS. We restrict the generated password to the 62-character set consisting of upper and lower-case alphanumerics.

Usage of plugin

pwgen::GeneratePassword 10
Pop $0
MessageBox MB_OK "Random password: $0"

Credits

• Written by Chase Venters
• last edited 10/09/2009