SP’s: Mira Modi, an 11-year-old girl, has started a business of selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each. She generated Diceware passwords, writes them by hands and sends by postal mail.
The unprecedented speed, at which data breaches are taking place and our online passwords are being compromised, is surely alarming. If nothing else, this confirms one fact that- World needs strong passwords?
Just few weeks ago, an 11-year-old girl Mira Modi started a small business of selling six-word Diceware passwords. She operated her business online via dicewarepasswords.com.
For those who don’t know, Diceware is a well-known technique to generate passwords. In the process, a normal six-sided dice is used to generate random numbers that are matched with the letters of English alphabet to generate words.
Now these words are combined into a string of words that doesn’t make sense. Hence, it’s very difficult to crack these passwords. But, surprisingly these passphrases are relatively easy to remember.
Talking to Ars Technica, Mira Modi says, “This whole concept of making your own passwords and being super secure and stuff, I don’t think my friends understand that, but I think it’s cool.”mira-modi-password-passphrase-1“I wanted to make it a public thing because I wasn’t getting very much money,” she said. “I thought it would be fun to have my own website.”
Mira is the daughter of Julia Angwin, a privacy-focused journalist and writer of her book Dragnet Nation. During the research work for her book, Angwin was employed to generate Diceware passwords. Later, Mira decided to turn it into a small business but her in-person sales were low. So, she decided to take the business online.
Talking about the worries of people regarding the security of passwords, she says: “People are worried that I will take your passwords, but in reality I won’t be able to remember them,” she told Ars. “But I don’t store them on any computer anywhere. As far as I know there is only one copy of your password.”
She sends the passwords to the customers by the US Postal Mail, which can’t be opened by the government without a search warrant.
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