Information Security News mailing list archives

This 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each


From: InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2015 09:18:16 +0000 (UTC)

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/this-11-year-old-is-selling-cryptographically-secure-passwords-for-2-each/

By Cyrus Farivar
Ars Technica
Oct 25, 2015

We now live in a world where a New York City sixth grader is making money selling strong passwords. Earlier this month, Mira Modi, 11, began a small business at dicewarepasswords.com, where she generates six-word Diceware passphrases by hand.

Diceware is a well-known decades-old system for coming up with passwords. It involves rolling actual six-sided dice as a way to generate truly random numbers that are matched to a long list of English words. Those words are then combined into a non-sensical string ("ample banal bias delta gist latex") that exhibits true randomness and is therefore difficult to crack. The trick, though, is that these passphrases prove relatively easy for humans to memorize.

"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," Modi told Ars by phone.

Modi is no ordinary sixth-grader, either. She’s the daughter of Julia Angwin, a veteran privacy-minded journalist at ProPublica and author of Dragnet Nation.

[...]

--
Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS.
Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less.
Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/

Current thread: