An enterprising 11-year old girl is using a pleasantly low-tech and decades-old system to create strong online passwords for her clients. Mira Modi uses Diceware, a password system that involves rolling six-sided dice, and matches the numbers to a long list of English words.
The results are a string of seemingly random words that are difficult to crack yet easily remembered by the human brain, Yahoo News reported.The passwords generated are non-sensical. Ars Technica used the example "ample banal bias delta gist latex" to show just how random the Diceware passwords are.
Modi uses the real world as her encryption. She generates the passwords by hand and the results are then sent to the customer via snail mail. In her first month of operation, she has already sent out 30 passwords to customers. She charges $2 for each password.
Modi's mother, Julia Angwin, is a privacy-minded journalist at ProPublica and the author of Dragnet Nation. Modi's interest in Diceware started when Angwin requested her daughter's assistance when she was writing her book. She needed Diceware passphrases which Modi gladly made.
She then got the idea to start selling these passwords. Her first customers were her mother's readers and she offered them Diceware passwords with dice and all. However, in-person sales proved to be too slow, The Next Web noted.
Now, she operates a website called dicewarepasswords.com to offer her passwords to the rest of the world. Clearly, she is not some ordinary school girl. She said, "I think [good passwords are] important. Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly."
She added, "We have so much more on our social media. We post a lot more social media-when people hack into that it's not really sad, but when people [try to] hack into your bank account or your e-mail, it's really important to have a strong password. We're all on the Internet now."
