What is Diceware?
Diceware is a type of way to making cryptographic passwords, passphrases,
or other vars (variables). How it works is simple, the user uses real physical dices as a hardware random number generator. This is actually surprisingly more difficult than many people are aware, even some coders don’t know this. Basically its almost impossible to generate an entirely random number with an ordered function. A crypto expert can add such greater drift or collision protectiveness for it to take “100’s or 1000’s of years”, but that is obviously eventually surpassed, and the “random” number sequence is either “not random enough” or “not random at all”; and unless there is some secret NSA encryption i’ve never heard of, it is impossible to generate a solid encryption algorithmn. I’ve been in password cracking a little while I suppose, as a bit of a past time on my 10 x p3 600 supercomputer cluster. I’ve never found a password that , couldn’t in time, be cracked to high success rates over 90%. With improvement I see no reason why the random seed could not approach or even equal 100%. As technology becomes more prevalent and powerful, password hashing alogorithms of all types will become less prevalent, and less powerful. Simple huh?
Back to diceware
For each word in the passphrase, five dice rolls are required. The numbers that come up in the rolls are assembled as a five digit number, e.g. 43146 corresponds to the word munch. Lists have been compiled for several languages, include English, Finnish, German and Spanish. A diceware word list is any list of 6^5= 7,776 unique words, preferably ones the user will find easy to spell and to remember.
The level of unpredictability
Diceware passphrases can be easily calculated: each word adds 12.9 bits of entropy to the passphrase (that is, log2(6^5) bits). Five words (slightly over 64 bits) are considered a minimum length.
Diceware passphrases can be difficult to remember and some may prefer other methods, such as using the initial letters of a memorable phrase. If the length of Diceware passphrases are assumed to be known to an attacker, then passphrases yields less entropy than the idea 64.62 bits when used with dictionaries containing variable-length words. This is because the length of the resulting passphrases “leak” information about their composition.
Basically what this is is an old philosophy. It’s insecure, I could generate more secure passwords with pwgen -L , however maybe not passphrases. It’s just diceware that creates the password, it doesn’t maintain it’s integrity interms of disk storage (if you use dicware to create ssh password , the decryption ability will be directly related to the hashing algorithmn used to encrypt it’s strength.