How can I generate random alphanumeric strings?

Question

How can I generate a random 8 character alphanumeric string in C#?

Answer 1

The main goals of my code are:

1. The distribution of strings is almost uniform (don't care about minor deviations, as long as they're small)
2. It outputs more than a few billion strings for each argument set. Generating an 8 character string (~47 bits of entropy) is meaningless if your PRNG only generates 2 billion (31 bits of entropy) different values.
3. It's secure, since I expect people to use this for passwords or other security tokens.

The first property is achieved by taking a 64 bit value modulo the alphabet size. For small alphabets (such as the 62 characters from the question) this leads to negligible bias. The second and third property are achieved by using RNGCryptoServiceProvider instead of System.Random.

using System;
using System.Security.Cryptography;

public static string GetRandomAlphanumericString(int length)
{
    const string alphanumericCharacters =
        "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" +
        "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" +
        "0123456789";
    return GetRandomString(length, alphanumericCharacters);
}

public static string GetRandomString(int length, IEnumerable characterSet)
{
    if (length < 0)
        throw new ArgumentException("length must not be negative", "length");
    if (length > int.MaxValue / 8) // 250 million chars ought to be enough for anybody
        throw new ArgumentException("length is too big", "length");
    if (characterSet == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException("characterSet");
    var characterArray = characterSet.Distinct().ToArray();
    if (characterArray.Length == 0)
        throw new ArgumentException("characterSet must not be empty", "characterSet");

    var bytes = new byte[length * 8];
    var result = new char[length];
    using (var cryptoProvider = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider())
    {
        cryptoProvider.GetBytes(bytes);
    }
    for (int i = 0; i < length; i++)
    {
        ulong value = BitConverter.ToUInt64(bytes, i * 8);
        result[i] = characterArray[value % (uint)characterArray.Length];
    }
    return new string(result);
}