Question

I need to generate some passwords, I want to avoid characters that can be confused for each other. Is there a definitive list of characters I should avoid? my current list is

il10o8B3Evu![]{}

Are there any other pairs of characters that are easy to confuse? for special characters I was going to limit myself to those under the number keys, though I know that this differs depending on your keyboards nationality!

As a rider question, I would like my passwords to be ‘wordlike’do you have a favoured algorithm for that?

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

Here are the character sets that Steve Gibson uses for his ‘Perfect Paper Password’ system. They are ‘characters to allow’ rather than ‘characters to avoid’, but they seem pretty reasonable for what you want:

A standard set of 64 characters

!#%[phone]:=?@ABCDEFGHJKLMNPRS TUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz 

A larger set of 88 characters

!'#$%&'()*+,-./23456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHJKLMNO PRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ 

For pronounceable passwords, I’m not familiar with the algorithms but you might want to look at APG and pwgen as a starting point.