secret-base32 v0.0.1

secret-base32

Randomly generate a secret token using base32 charset i.e. alphanumeric omitting letters i and o and digits zero and one.

We omit those characters to avoid potential confusion if transcribed by humans e.g. for hand-written backup.

This is suitable for secret URLs, whereas base64 includes slash in its charset.

Also see related project for base56 which uses upper and lowercase: https://github.com/evanx/secret-base56

It is implemented as follows:

const assert = require('assert');
const crypto = require('crypto');
const letters24 = 'ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ'; // exclude I and O since too similar to 0 and 1
const digits8 = '23456789'; // omit 0 and 1 to avoid potential confusion with O and I (and perhaps 'l')
const charset = [digits8, letters24].join('');
assert.equal(charset.length, 32);
const length = parseInt(process.env.length || '16');
const string = crypto.randomBytes(length)
.map(value => charset.charCodeAt(Math.floor(value*charset.length/256)))
.toString();
console.log(string);

where we generate an array of random bytes (values 0 to 255 inclusive) of the desired length and then map each into our charset:

23456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ

We can build using its Dockerfile as follows:

docker build -t secret-base32:test https://github.com/evanx/secret-base32.git

where we tag the image so we can run by tag name:

docker run -t secret-base32:test 

which gives random output e.g. N2ZCRDNT5KQCN9R7

Use length envar to change from default 16

docker run -e length=40 -e lowercase=true secret-base32:test

which outputs length 40 token e.g. ft8wg53dtllreznb4ld8t27epmn9n49t9htjf3w5

You can then use this for a secret URL e.g. for a Telegram Bot webhook, or some other purpose.

Related

See the following related project which is case-sensitive base56.

https://github.com/evanx/secret-base56

Base56 is worse for hand-written backups since some letters have similar shapes in lowercase e.g. c, s, u, v

However for ephemeral secret URLs where hand-written backups are not useful, then base56 is better as shorter strings can encode larger numbers.