11-year-old Indian-origin girl sells secure passwords in US

11-year-old Indian-origin girl sells secure passwords in US

New York: Mira Modi, an 11 year old girl of Indian origin in the US has started her own website where dice rolls generate cryptographically secure passwords.

The sixth grader in New York City charges $2 to generate a six-word Diceware passphrase for her customers.

Diceware, a familiar system which goes decades back, uses dice rolling as a way to generate random numbers, which are then matched to a long list of English words.

The passphrases are then created by combining these words into a non-sensical string which is very random and thus, difficult to crack. However, these passphrases have been proved to be easily memorized by humans.

"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 Technica'.

Julia Angwin, Modi's mother, is a veteran journalist and author of Dragnet Nation. As a part of research for her book, Angwin employed her daughter to generate passphrases.

It was at this time that Modi thought of turning this into a business.

Modi physically rolls a dice for each order she gets, and looks up the words in a printed copy of the Diceware word list. She then notes down the corresponding password string onto a piece of paper and sends it to the customer by post.

"I think (good passwords are) important. Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly," Modi said.

(Inputs from Economic Times)

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