New York: It’s the era of start-ups, you know, people finishing off their studies and starting their own business. So, why then, when Mira Modi started her own business, people went gaga?
That’s because she’s a sixth grader. All of 11 years old. And no, she doesn’t sell crafts or something, She sells passwords. Secure passwords, to be precise. Yes, you read that right.
An enterprising 11-year-old Indian-origin girl in the US has started her own business 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, but I think it’s cool,” Mira said.
Mira’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 Mira had the idea to turn it into a small business.
For every order, Mira rolls a physical dice and looks up the words in a printed copy of the Diceware word list. She writes down the corresponding password string onto a piece of paper and sends it by postal mail to the customer.
“I think (good passwords are) important. Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly,” Mira said.
(With PTI inputs)