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Random Username Generator
Sometimes you need a username for a service, and you may not want it to be tied to your name. You could try to come up with something off the top of your head, but while that might seem random, it's still a name you would think of, and the temptation will always be to choose something meaningful to you. So you want to create a random username. On the other hand, "gsfVauIZLuE1s4gO" is extremely awkward as a username. It'd be better to have something more memorable; something that might seem kinda normal at a casual glance,
You could grab a random pair of lines from /usr/share/dict/words, but that includes prefixes, acronymns, proper nouns, and scientific terms. Even without those, "stampedingly-isicle" is a bit "problematical". So I'd rather use "adjective"-"noun". I went looking for word lists that included parts of speech information, and found a collection of English words categorized by various themes, which are grouped by parts of speech. The list is much smaller, but the words are also going to be more common, and therefore more familiar.
Using this word list, and choosing one adjective and one noun yields names like "gray-parent", "boxy-median", and "religious-tree". The smaller list means that such a name only has about 20 bits of randomness, but for a username, that's probably sufficient.
On the otherhand, we could use something like this for passwords like "correct horse battery staple", but in the form of adjective-adjective-adjective-noun. Given the part-of-speech constraint, 3 adjectives + 1 noun is about 40 bits of entropy. Increasing that to 4 adjectives and 1 noun gets about 49 bits of entropy.
So of course, I implemented such a utility in Python:
usage: generate-username [-h] [--adjectives ADJECTIVES] [--divider DIVIDER] [--bits BITS] [--verbose]
Generate a random-but-memorable username.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--adjectives ADJECTIVES, -a ADJECTIVES
number of adjectives (default: 1)
--divider DIVIDER character or string between words (default: )
--bits BITS minimum bits of entropy (default: 0)
--verbose be chatty (default: False)
As the word list grows, the number of bits of entropy per word will increase, so the code calculates that from the data it actually has. It allows you to specify the number of adjectives and the amount of entropy desired so you can choose something appropriate for the usecase.
That said, 128 bits of entropy does start to get a little unweildy with 13 adjectives and one noun: "concrete-inverse-sour-symmetric-saucy-stone-kind-flavorful-roaring-vertical-human-balanced-ebony-gofer". Whoo-boy; that's one weird gofer. That could double as a crazy writing prompt.
If the word list had adverbs, we might be able to make this even more interesting. For that matter, it might be fun to create a set of "Mad Libs"-like patterns "The [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] a [adjective] [noun]." Verb tenses and conjugations would make that more difficult to generate, but could yield quite memorable passphrases. Something to explore some other time.
Hopefully this will be useful to others.
