An 11-year-old is selling ciphered passwords for $2 each

A sixth grader from New York City, Mira Modi, 11, has been selling strong ciphered passwords using Diceware for $2 each. She started a small business at dicewarepasswords.com, where she comes up with six-word Diceware keywords by hand.

Diceware is a well-known system used to create passwords that involves rolling six-sided dice to generate random numbers that correspond with a long list of English words. The words are then combined into a string that does not make much sense (i.e. ample banal bias delta gist latex) and displays randomness, thus making it difficult to crack. The trick is that these passphrases prove somewhat easy for humans to memorize.

“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 said.

Modi is not your typical sixth grader: Her mother is Julia Angwin, a veteran journalist at ProPublica and the author of Dragnet Nation .

As part of research for her book, Angwin asked Modi to generate Diceware passwords, but Modi had no idea it would turn into a small business. She started out accompanying her mother on book-related events and selling passwords she came up with on the spot. In-person sales were slow, which caused Modi to create her online business.

“I wanted to make it a public thing because I wasn’t getting very much money,” she said. “I thought it would be fun to have my own website.”

When an order comes in, Modi rolls the physical dice and then looks up words in the Diceware word list. She hand-writes the password string onto a piece of paper and sends it by mail to the customer. If Modi did this full time and kept at it, she would be making approximately $12 an hour, which is a third higher than the current minimum wage in New York State at $8.75 (set to go to $9 on December 31, 2015). Not bad for an eleven year old.

“I think strong passwords are important. Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly,” she said.

Via Ars Technica