DicePhrase
Lucas Bleackley Petter
DicePhrase helps you easily create strong, memorable passphrases, such as "FragrantRenewedAnyoneBakedPossum" or "BazookaClangUnstuckTransferQuoteJokingly", by rolling six-sided dice to randomly select from a set of thousands of words. This system creates passphrases that are more unguessable than if you were to pick words on your own or trust the computer to generate words automatically. π² Passphrases, not passwords Long, random passphrases are more secure because they're more difficult for an attacker to guess than simple passwords. While a password like "Batman1989" is too easily guessed and "&1KJl6a8y$g*01W}i21!MZ" is too hard to remember, random passphrases like "DonutConfinedCurveHurricaneJuggleWidget" are strong and memorable. Passphrases don't need to be personal to be memorable. Personal things like birthdays, addresses, anniversaries, names, lyrics, books, movies, etc. are not very secret; anyone can find out your address, pet's name, or favourite songs. Picking words randomly ensures your passphrase is unbiased and unpredictable. π² Roll the dice You do five dice rolls to randomly select each word for your passphrase, so if you need a 6-word passphrase, that's 30 dice rolls. Input the numbers into DicePhrase, which will then use them to look up corresponding words in a table of 7776 possible words to generate your new passphrase. With each additional word, the chances that anyone could ever guess your passphrase become exponentially smaller. π² Why use dice? Dice are a more reliable and transparent source of randomness than choosing numbers yourself or having a computer generate random numbers. Humans tend to have too much bias when attempting to make random selections, and it's hard to prove that the complex systems used by computers for creating randomness are truly unpredictable. If you don't need such a high level of unpredictability, DicePhrase can generate pseudo-random numbers without dice when you click "Skip" in the main window, although using dice is still recommended. π² When to use passphrases Passphrases are ideal when used to encrypt information. They're perfect as the master password for a password manager so you only need to remember a single strong passphrase. They're also great for securing WiFi networks, disk encryption, PGP or SSH encryption keys, and any other encryption system. Use them whenever you need memorable authentication in general. For online accounts, having strong passphrases is good, but may not be enough protection from attackers who use techniques like phishing to steal credentials. You should enable Two-Factor Authentication, which adds a second step to the login process, and consider saving unique passphrases for each account in a password manager. π² Secure design DicePhrase is built to protect the confidentiality of your passphrases. Most importantly, passphrases aren't saved, they're automatically cleared 10 minutes after they've been created (you should memorize them or save them in a password manager application). DicePhrase is also free and open source software, so anyone can inspect the code to verify its safety. You can read more about DicePhrase's security design, as well as how to report bugs, in the Help document. DicePhrase is based on best practice strategies for creating passphrases by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, security technologist Micah Lee, and the Diceware project. https://www.eff.org/dice https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/passphrases-can-memorize-attackers-cant-guess/ http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html For more info about DicePhrase, please see: https://www.lucaspetter.com/software/dicephrase/ For support and help, please see: https://github.com/dicephrase/dicephrase/blob/master/doc/help.md To see the code, report bugs, or help build DicePhrase, please see: https://github.com/dicephrase/dicephrase
