Expnaded character set

[tiktin]

This system is a great idea!  Thank you!

I see there's already been some discussion about including or excluding certain characters.  But I think expanding the character set beyond just the hex characters is generally a good idea.  Right now, the password character set will be either 0-9a-f or 0-9A-F.  For an 8 character unix password, that's only a search space of 16^8 = 2^32.  If you use all the alpha, numeric and punctuation ASCII characters, you get 94^8, which is over a million times more.  The character set would be:

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>[email protected]
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
[\]^_`
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
{|}~

One idea would be to fill a 256 byte table with these values, repeating as needed and scramble it.  Then use the bytes of the hash to index the table to get the password.

Do you think this would be a worthwhile enhancement?

Dave

[Eric H. Jung]

Hi Tiktin,
Thanks for the great idea. This feature has been requested numerous times and is on the "to-do" list (see here and here). In fact, much of the needed code is already in the extension and has been since version 0.2 or 0.3. I just need to write the GUI for it now.

Two more encodings will be supported in addition to Base16 (hex): Base64, which uses this character set:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/=

and Base95, which uses this character set:

`1234567890-=qwertyuiop[]asdfghjkl;'\\zxcvbnm,./~!@#$%^&*()_+QWERTYUIOP{}ASDFGHJKL:\"|ZXCVBNM<>?

I am very nearly finished and these will be in 0.6.1 (due out shortly). If there any other encodings you think I should add, please let me know!

Thanks,
Eric Jung