Generating a secure random password with vRealize Orchestrator (vRO/vCO)

Published on 6/1/2015 - Read in about 2 min (324 words)

Published under vRealize Orchestrator #Automation #JavaScript #password #secure #vCenter Orchestrator #vco #vRealize Orchestrator #vro

This article is now 11 years old! It is highly likely that this information is out of date and the author will have completely forgotten about it. Please take care when following any guidance to ensure you have up-to-date recommendations.

It’s a fairly common requirement when creating a new user to assign a randomly generated password, so during a recent engagement I wrote a little password generator to do that. I wanted to be able to chose whether special characters were used, and the length of the password - typically if the password doesn’t used special characters I would increase the length significantly!

Characters should be randomly picked from:

a-z
A-Z
0-9
(optional) ASCII special characters

Inputs

passwordLength - the length of the password to be generated (number)
excludePunctuation - exclude the use of special characters if TRUE (boolean)

Outputs

generatedPassword - the generated password (SecureString)

The SecureString type prevents the string from being displayed in the workflow attributes - it can be used as a normal string, but will be asterisk’d when displayed. Only a very slight security increase, but a nice touch.

Schema

A very, very simple schema - one scriptable task!

The Script

I’ve heavily commented the script, so that hopefully anyone can follow it:

Testing

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say! I’ve left a line in the script to log the plaintext of the password so that it can be tested - that should be commented out or deleted if you’re planning on using the script!

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Download

You can download the workflow here - New-SecurePassword (zip)