New York: An enterprising 11-year-old Indian-origin girl in the US has started her own business on Sunday selling cryptographically secure passwords generated by dice rolls.
Mira Modi, a sixth grader in New York City, has her own website and generates six-word Diceware passphrases for her customers at $2 each.
Diceware is a well-known decades-old system for coming up with passwords. It involves rolling a dice as a way to generate random numbers that are matched to a long list of English words.
Those words are then combined into a non-sensical string that exhibits true randomness and is therefore difficult to crack. These passphrases have proven relatively easy for humans to memorise.
“This whole concept of making your own passwords and being super secure and stuff, I don’t think my friends understand that,” Modi said.
Modi’s mother, Julia Angwin, a veteran journalist and author of Dragnet Nation, employed her daughter to generate Diceware passphrases as a part of research for her book.
That is when Modi had the idea to turn it into a small business. “Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly,” Modi said.
