A good password is worth its weight in gold – but an entrepreneurial 11-year-old from New York City will supply you with one for just two dollars.
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“This is my first business (other than occasional lemonade stands!),”she wrote. But I’m very excited about it and will be very responsible”. She also explains how Diceware, a decades-old password generating system, works: “You roll a die 5 times and write down each number”. Then you look up the resulting five-digit number in the Diceware dictionary, which contains a numbered list of short words. Those words are then combined into a non-sensical string, such as: alger klm curry blond puck horse.
And she does not store a copy of any passwords she generated for any customers.
Modi is the daughter of Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist and author of Dragnet Nation, which deals with privacy, security and surveillance. According to Mori’s website, “Six words may be breakable by an organization with a very large budget, such as a large country’s security agency”.
Says Mira: “I wanted to make it a public thing because I wasn’t getting very much money”. “I thought it would be fun to have my own website”.
As she reminds customers on her website: “The passwords are sent by US Postal Mail which can not be opened by the government without a search warrant”.
Buyers are advised to change the passwords slightly – adding capital letters or extra symbols – so that they’re not exactly the same as the ones they’ve been sent.
“People are anxious that I will take your passwords, but in reality I won’t be able to remember them”, she told Ars.
Yes, this makes the password vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, and it is far more secure to simply get a set of dice and generate your own password.
Although Modi hasn’t made enough to pay for her college education yet (she’s sold about 30 passwords to date), her experience starting her own business is invaluable and already has her thinking about a future in technology.
“I think [good passwords are] important”. First, they must be unique – meaning not available in any of the publicly available lists of previously hacked passwords. “Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly”.
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Let’s be real: most of us are guilty of making passwords that our BFF could figure out in a few minutes.
