Passwords are crucial to online security. They are the first line of defense against unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems. It is paramount to use strong passwords to protect your online accounts. Users claim an identity with a unique username and then prove their identity with authentication. In this case, we will focus on a password as the form of authentication. Weak passwords are a common vulnerability exploited by threat actors through brute force attacks, credential stuffing, dictionary attacks, password spraying, and many other forms. A strong password is long, random, and unique. This might look like a password that is at least twelve characters long, a string of mixed-case letters, numbers, symbols, and used for one account and one account only. Using a password for more than one account can increase the risk of your passwords being compromised. It is also a good practice to regularly change your passwords.
Line 1 imports Python's random module, which allows you to generate random numbers. Which will be used in this script to randomize characters for the generated password.
Line 2 imports Python's string module, which will be used to create a string containing letters (lowercase and uppercase), digits, and punctation.
Line 4 defines a function named generate_password that takes one argument. The length of the password that will be generated by the script.
Line 5 is a docstring that provides a short description of the function.
Line 6 checks if the specified password length is less than six.
Line 7 utilizes a print statement if the length is too short, it prints a message warning that the password must be at least 6 characters.
Line 8 the function returns none if the length is too short (no password is generated),
Lines 11-14 define our character sets which will be used to create a string in the next line of code. Each of these variables holds a string containing different sets of characters provided by the string module.
Line 17 creates a string of all possible characters that could appear in the generated password, by combining the four sets (lowercase, uppercase, digits, and special characters.
Lines 18-23 initialize a list with one randomly chosen character from each set. This ensures the password will have at least one of each type.
Line 26 adds more characters to the password, randomly choosing characters from the all_characters string. The number of characters added is length - 4 because four characters have already been added to meet the requirements.
Line 29 shuffles the list of characters in password.
Line 31 joins the list of characters in the password into a single string and returns it.
Line 34 begins a try block to catch errors.
Line 35 prompts the user to input the desired password length and coverts it to an integer.
Line 36 calls the generate_password function with the user's input and stores the generated password in password.
Line 37-38 if a valid password is returned it prints the generated password.
Line 39-40 is for error handling, if the user input is not valid, it prompts the user to enter a valid number.