Improvement of the Diceware method for generating safe passwords

• Grant number: 16/11505-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2016
• End date: August 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science
• Principal Investigator: Diego de Freitas Aranha
• Grantee: Leandro Augusto Fernandes de Magalhães
• Host Institution: Instituto de Computação (IC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The advent of computing in the last decades made the storage of big amounts of data of any nature (documments, pictures, etc) in an electronic device possible.The fact of these data being secret most of the times made necessary the creation of an authentication method capable of retaining the data's confidentiality.The passwords and the passphrases emerged as a safe, efficient and flexible mean of authentication, however, with questionable security.Since they are often chosen by the users, they sometimes tend to choose easily memorized keywords, and thus, easily deductible (for being, often, user-related, like dates of birth, phone numbers, familiar names, etc) compromising the integrity of their data.One of the biggest issues for researchers from the computer security area is to develop an authentication method which is at the same time safe and user-friendly, that is, easily usable and embeddable for them.This work aims to study and propose improvements to Diceware, a method for the generation of safe and easily memorized passphrases created by Arnold Reinhold, as well as adapt it to the portuguese idiom.