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| title | date | draft | tags | medium_enabled | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Generate Secure Passphrases Locally with Diceware | 2020-05-01T00:22:31-04:00 | false |
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true |
Diceware is a passphrase generator proposed by Arnold G. Reinhold. Passphrases contain multiple words which are chosen according to a sequence of dice rolls. Let's look at a simplified example where we have binary dice (0 or 1) and we have a wordlist of two dice rolls.
00 abacus
01 abdomen
10 abdominal
11 abide
If you roll a zero twice, then you choose the word abacus. If you roll a zero and then a one, you choose the word abdomen.
In reality, Joseph Bonneau over at the EFF, compiled a wordlist that consists of six dice rolls with a regular 5 sided dice. Resulting in a total of 6^5 or 7776 different english words.
Instead of rolling physical dice forever, we can use a nicely put together python package called diceware. It is easily installable via pip: pip install diceware. The README explains the security implications far better than I can. At the time of writing, it uses by default urandom on Linux to choose 6 words from the EFF word list from before.
diceware
Gave me the random passphrase "DrearilyUncorruptOutboardKneeSubzeroGumdrop".