Tag Archives: cryptography
Take Puzzles to the Next Level with a Puzzly Experience!
Hey there, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers. It's the day after Thanksgiving, and naturally, our thoughts turn toward the upcoming holiday season. (Particularly with all the Black Friday advertising!)
Sure, we could use this opportunity to talk about our Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide, which went live Tuesday and features all sorts of marvelous games, puzzles, and products.
We could also talk about our fantastic lineup of apps, from Daily POP Crosswords and the Penny Dell Crosswords App to Penny Dell Sudoku and Classic Word Search. Of course we could do that.
But instead, today we'd like to talk about puzzly experiences.
If you're looking for an engaging and interactive puzzly adventure to share with the puzzlers in your life, there are all sorts of options available to you.
There are yearly puzzle hunts like BAPHL, the Boston Area Puzzle Hunt League. There are crossword tournaments like Lollapuzzoola and the Indie 500 (plus local ones all over the country!). Murder mystery dinners, scavenger hunts… not only are there places that host all of these, but there are even kits available online that let you host your own!
More Escape Rooms pop up every year — from Breakin Escape Rooms in London to our friends at Escape 101 in Connecticut — and one near you is just a Google search away.
But there's one particular puzzly experience I want to highlight as an option for you this holiday season.
Magician and crossword constructor David Kwong is launching a one-of-a-kind puzzle experience, The Enigmatist, at the High Line Hotel in New York City during the month of January.
Advertised as "an immersive evening of puzzles, cryptology and illusions," the show is based on the experiences of William and Elizebeth Friedman's work at Riverbank, a peculiar hotbed for codebreaking in the early days of the twentieth century.
David is a master at melding the world of puzzles with illusions, magic, and sleight of hand, deftly employing both humor and skill to wow audiences, and I expect he has outdone himself with this show.
The Enigmatist sounds like a unique and amazing puzzly experience, and if you're interested, you can get tickets here.
For full details, visit the Enigmatist website. I think the show will be something truly special.
Posted in Games, PuzzleNation, Puzzles	| Tagged Announcements, BAPHL, boston area puzzle hunt league, breakin escape rooms, codebreaking, cryptography, Daily Pop, daily pop crosswords, daily pop crosswords app, David Kwong, Elizebeth Friedman, elizebeth smith friedman, Enigmatist, escape 101, Escape room, Geeking Out, high line hotel, Holidays, illusion, Indie 500, Lollapuzzoola, magic, murder mystery, murder mystery dinner, New York City, Penny Dell Crossword App, Penny Dell Crosswords App, Penny Dell Puzzles, Penny Press, Penny/Dell Puzzles, Pop culture, puzzle event, puzzle experience, Puzzle history, puzzle hunt, PuzzleNation, Puzzlin' fool, puzzly event, puzzly experience, riverbank, scavenger hunt, the enigmatist, william friedman, Wordplay	| Leave a reply
Elizebeth Smith Friedman, Codebreaker and Scourge of Nazi Spymasters
[William and Elizebeth Smith Friedman, hard at work.
Image courtesy of National Geographic.]
Last year, I rather ambitiously attempted to summarize the early history of American codebreaking and the NSA in a series of blog posts spanning World War II through the modern day. One of the names I cited in that series, William Friedman, is synonymous with American cryptography, thanks to his contributions to the cracking of the German ENIGMA code and his efforts to establish the National Security Agency.
Unfortunately, there is a gaping hole in the narrative I constructed. Because none of my sources made any reference to another crucial Friedman: Elizebeth Smith Friedman, William's wife and partner in code-cracking.
Yes, she was name-dropped in my post about the book Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, but she had to share those pages with a host of underappreciated women who were codebreaking geniuses.
[Image courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.]
As The Woman Who Smashed Codes explains, she wasn't just a talented codebreaker. She literally wrote the book on it. Eight of them, in fact. The Riverbank Publications — although often credited to her husband — covered new codebreaking techniques in rich detail, and they are still referred to today as part of the foundation of modern cryptography.
She also started the first and only American codebreaking unit ever run by a woman, serving as Cryptanalyst-in-Charge while jointly working for both the Treasury and the Coast Guard during and after World War II.
A history of American codebreaking without Elizebeth Smith Friedman is woefully incomplete, and in today's post, I hope to rectify that oversight.
[Image courtesy of the Marshall Foundation.]
Elizebeth's work with codes started in a most peculiar way. While seeking a job as a librarian after college, she was recruited by eccentric millionaire George Fabyan to live and work at Riverbank, his palatial estate that doubled as a self-funded research center for all sorts of scientific endeavors.
Elizebeth's deep knowledge of Shakespeare was put to work attempting to prove Fabyan's theory that there were secret messages encoded in the writings of Shakespeare. Although her work failed to uncover any hidden pattern in Shakespeare's words or font choices, it did lead to two unexpected developments: a career in codebreaking and a budding romance with fellow Riverbank recruit William Friedman, whose own interest in codebreaking was sparked by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Thanks to the proliferation of radio, there was a seismic shift in how information was being passed between military units, governments, and other organizations, so the ability to listen in on one's enemies (and allies) was not only a new strategic opportunity, but it was a relatively new science.
In short, America needed codebreakers who could crack the secret messages being transmitted (and intercepted). The military didn't have them. The government didn't have them.
But Riverbank did. And for the first eight months of World War I, the small group of William, Elizebeth, and those they trained handled ALL of the codebreaking for every part of the US government, from the State Department to the Army to the DOJ. William and Elizebeth began running a codebreaking school out of Riverbank, even embedding a secret message in a photo of the class taken on the last day of the course.
[Images courtesy of Elonka.com.]
In the aftermath of the First World War, codebreaking had become so important that countries were turning to machines to help develop uncrackable codes. And yet, at this point, American cryptography as a whole consisted of about 50 people. William went to work for the government, establishing the American version of Bletchley Park — Arlington Hall — and setting the stage for the creation of the NSA.
Elizebeth, on the other hand, cracked codes from home. And she did so for both the Treasury Department and the Coast Guard, who would send her sealed packages of intercepted encrypted intel and communications. In her first three months hunting down rum-runners during Prohibition, she solved two years' worth of backlogged messages.
During World War II, Elizebeth's Coast Guard Cryptography Unit turned their attention from smuggling (which waned during wartime) to cracking German codes. Under her tutelage, they would crack three different variations on the Enigma codes, each more complex than the last. (The British also cracked ENIGMA, independently of American efforts.)
Sadly, in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, the US military didn't want civilians in charge of sensitive operations, so Elizebeth was demoted. Yes, she was no longer in charge of the group she started, trained, and cultivated, instead answering to a new boss of dubious cryptographic talents.
(Of course, the sexist dimwits making decisions like this had to grin and bear it when numerous other organizations and agencies continued to asked for Elizebeth's assistance by name.)
And stealing Elizebeth's credit was practically a cottage industry over at the FBI. We have them to thank for erasing Elizebeth's role in particular — and the Coast Guard's role in general — in hunting down, exposing, and compromising Nazi spy networks in South America, even though the FBI's hamfisted blundering actually served to expose codebreaking operations in the past, forcing Elizebeth to crack new codes in order to regain the advantage the FBI had squandered.
Oh, yeah, did I mention that both during AND after World War II, Elizebeth continued to hound the Nazi forces in South America who sought to destabilize the region?
As one historian put it, referring to the thousands of pages of decryptions Elizebeth produced:
These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups. They put fascist spies in prison. They drove wedges between Germany and other nations that were trying to sustain and prolong Nazi terror. By any measure, Elizebeth was a great heroine of the Second World War.
The British knew it. The navy knew it. The FBI knew it. But the American public never did, because Elizebeth wasn't allowed to speak.
[Image courtesy of Find a Grave.]
Even in their retirement, the Friedmans continued to contribute to the world of cryptography. They returned to the subject of Shakespeare with The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined, thoroughly debunking the whole idea of hidden codes in the Bard's works.
When William died, Elizebeth even hid a secret message on his tombstone, for those who knew how to look. (It was Bacon's cipher, something they both studied extensively during their time at Riverbank.) What a touching tribute to how she met her partner and husband.
And although the accolades and appreciation for Elizebeth's incredible contributions have been slow in coming, they are trickling in. In the 1990s, the NSA renamed its auditorium from the William F. Friedman Memorial Auditorium to the William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman Memorial Auditorium. A Justice Department building also has an auditorium bearing her name.
More information about the massive expansion of codebreaking worldwide is coming to light with every passing year. Hopefully that will mean greater attention for minds like Elizebeth, who used her puzzly mind to protect the world. That's someone worth celebrating.
[Much of the information in this post comes from a wonderful book on Elizebeth, The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone, and it's well-worth your time to check out her story in full.]
Posted in PuzzleNation, Puzzles	| Tagged american codebreaking, american cryptography, american spycraft, arlington hall, bletchley park, Book review, Brain teaser, cipher, coast guard, code breaking, code cracking, code girls, codebreaking, codecracking, cryptanalysis, cryptanalyst, cryptography, Elizebeth Friedman, elizebeth smith friedman, encrypt, encryption, Enigma, first world war, Geeking Out, george fabyan, jason fagone, knowledge is power, National Security Agency, nazi, nazi spycraft, NSA, Pop culture, prohibition, Puzzle history, PuzzleNation, Puzzlin' fool, puzzly history, riverbank, riverbank publications, second world war, south america, the shakespeare ciphers examined, the woman who smashed codes, treasury department, william friedman, Wordplay, world war 1, world war 2, world war i, world war ii	| 6 Replies
Puzzle History: Codebreaking and the NSA, part 3
Posted on July 11, 2017 by gmdirect
[Image courtesy of NSA's official Twitter account.]
At the end of part 2 in our series, we left off during the early days of the NSA, as American cryptographers continued to labor under the shadow of the Black Friday change in Russian codes.
You may have noticed that part 2 got a little farther from puzzly topics than part 1, and there's a reason for that. As the NSA evolved and grew, codebreaking was downplayed in favor of data acquisition. The reasons for this were twofold:
1. Context. You need to understand why given encrypted information is important in order to put it toward the best possible use. As Budiansky stated in part 1, "The top translators at Bletchley were intelligence officers first, who sifted myriad pieces to
assemble an insightful whole."
2. Russian surveillance and bugging continued to grow more clever and sophisticated, pushing attention away from codebreaking. After all, what good is breaking codes or developing new ones if they can just steal unencrypted intel firsthand by monitoring
agents in the field?
Moving forward, the NSA would continue to pursue all manner of data mining, eventually leaving behind much of the codebreaking and analysis that originally formed the backbone of the organization. But that was in years to come. Cryptography was still a major player in NSA operations from the '50s and onward.
[The progression of "secret" and "top secret" code words.
Image courtesy of NSA's official Twitter account.]
In May 1956, NSA cryptanalytic veterans pushed a proposal titled "Recommendations for a Full-Scale Attack on the Russian High-Level Systems," believing that specially designed computers from IBM could provide the key for cracking the impenetrable Russian cryptography wall. Some cryptographers believed that ever-increasing processor speeds would eventually outpace even sophisticated codes.
By 1960, the NSA had spent $100 million on computers and analytical tools.
The problem? The NSA was collecting so much information that their increasingly small team of cryptoanalysts couldn't dream of processing even a tiny portion of it.
But the quest for data access would only grow more ambitious.
In the wake of Sputnik's launch in October of 1957, US signals intelligence would go where no man had gone before. The satellite GRAB, launched alongside Transit II-A in June of 1960, was supposedly meant to study cosmic radiation. (GRAB stood for Galactic Radiation and Background.)
But it was actually intended to collect radar signals from two Soviet air-defense systems. This was the next step of ELINT, electronic intelligence work. (The younger brother of SIGINT.)
The NSA would later find a huge supporter in President Lyndon Johnson, as the president was heavily invested in SIGINT, ELINT, and any other INTs he could access. This did little to quell the intelligence-gathering rivalry growing between the CIA and NSA.
Of course, that's not to say that the NSA ceased to do any worthwhile work in codebreaking. Far from it, actually.
During the Vietnam War, NSA analysts pored over North Vietnamese signals, trying to uncover how enemy pilots managed to scramble and respond so quickly to many of the US's airstrikes conducted during Operation Rolling Thunder.
Careful analysis revealed an aberrant character (in Morse code) in messages that appeared in North Vietnamese transmissions before 90 percent of the Rolling Thunder airstrikes. By identifying when the enemy used that aberrant character, the analysts
were able to warn US pilots whether they were heading toward a prepared enemy or an unsuspecting one during a given sortie.
Other NSA teams worked to protect US communications by playing the role of an enemy analyst. They would try to break US message encryptions and see how much they could learn from intercepted US signals. Identifying flaws in their own procedures — as well as members of the military who were cutting corners when it came to secured communications — helped to make US communications more secure.
[Image courtesy of NSA.gov.]
In 1979, Jack Gurin, the NSA's Chief of Language Research, wrote an article in the NSA's in-house publication Cryptolog, entitled "Let's Not Forget Our Cryptologic Mission." He believed much of the work done at the agency, and many of the people
hired, had strayed from the organization's core mission.
The continued push for data acquisition over codebreaking analysis in the NSA led to other organizations picking up the slack. The FBI used (and continues to use) codebreakers and forensic accountants when dealing with encrypted logs from criminal organizations covering up money laundering, embezzlement, and other illegal activities.
And groups outside the government also made impressive gains in the field of encryption, among them IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the Center for International Security and Arms Control, and even graduate student programs at universities like MIT and Stanford.
For instance, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie developed the concept of the asymmetric cipher. Joichi Ito explains it well in Whiplash:
Unlike any previously known code, asymmetric ciphers do not require the sender and receiver to have the same key. Instead, the sender (Alice) gives her public key to Bob, and Bob uses it to encrypt a message to Alice. She decrypts it using her private key. It no longer matters if Eve (who's eavesdropping on their conversation) also has Alice's public key, because the only thing she'll be able to do with it is encrypt a message that only Alice can read.
This would lead to a team at MIT developing RSA, a technique that implemented Diffie's asymmetric cipher concept. (It's worth noting that RSA encryption is still used to this day.)
[Image courtesy of Campus Safety Magazine.com.]
The last big sea change in encryption came when the government and military realized they no longer had a monopoly on codebreaking technology. Increased reliance and awareness of the importance of computer programming, greater access to computers with impressive processing power, and a groundswell of support for privacy from prying government eyes, led to dual arms races: encryption and acquisition.
And this brings us to the modern day. The revelations wrought by Edward Snowden's leak of NSA information revealed the incredible depth of government data mining and acquistion, leading some pundits to claim that the NSA is "the only part of government that actually listens."
Whatever your feelings on Snowden's actions or government surveillance, there is no doubt that the National Security Agency has grown and changed a great deal since the days of cracking the ENIGMA code or working with the crew at Bletchley Park.
Where will American codebreaking go next? Who knows? Perhaps quantum computing will bring codes so complicated they'll be impenetrable.
All I know is… it's part of puzzle history.
I hope you enjoyed this multi-part series on the history of 20th-century codebreaking in America. If you'd like to learn more, you can check out some of the valuable sources I consulted while working on these posts:
Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union by Stephen Budiansky
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joichi Ito
The Secret Lives of Codebreakers by Sinclair McKay
Posted in PuzzleNation, Puzzles	| Tagged american codebreaking, asymmetric key, Black Friday, bletchley park, Brain teaser, british intelligence, center for international security and arms control, CIA, CISAC, code warriors, codebreaking, codecracking, codecraft, cryptography, cryptolog, data acquisition, data mining, decrypt, DIY puzzling, edward snowden, electronic intelligence, elint, encryption, Enigma, fbi, forensic accounting, galactic radiation and background, games, GC&CS, GCHQ, Geeking Out, Government Code and Cypher School, Government Communications Headquarters, grab, IBM, jack gurin, Joichi Ito, let's not forget our cryptographic mission, Lyndon Johnson, MIT, National Security Agency, north vietnam, NSA, operation rolling thunder, Pop culture, president johnson, president truman, prism, Puzzle history, PuzzleNation, Puzzlin' fool, puzzly history, quantum computer, Recommendations for a Full-Scale Attack on the Russian High-Level Systems, rsa encryption, sigint, signals intelligence, Sinclair McKay, sputnik, spycraft, stanford university, stephen budiansky, surveillance, the russian problem, The Secret Lives of Codebreakers, thomas j watson research center, transit II-A, vietnam war, Whiplash, Whitfield Diffie, Wordplay, world war 2, world war ii	| Leave a reply
Posted on July 6, 2017 by gmdirect
At the end of part 1 of our look at the history of the NSA and American codebreaking, we left off with the pivotal Black Friday event.
On November 1, 1948, all intel coming from monitored Soviet signals went quiet. All traffic on military, naval, and police radio links was replaced with dummy messages. It was such an unprecedented and alarming event that London and Washington briefly considered that it might've been the first indication of preparations for war.
According to Code Warriors author Stephen Budiansky:
The full extent of the disaster only became apparent the following spring when real traffic started reappearing on the radio nets, now employing greatly improved — and completely unbreakable — technical and security procedures. The keying errors or other mistakes that had allowed most of the Soviets' machine-enciphered military traffic to be routinely read by US and British codebreakers for the last several years had been corrected, and the much more disciplined systems that now replaced them slammed the cryptanalytic door shut.
Even the one-time pads that had offered some hope to attentive American codebreakers were updated, eliminating the ability to sort messages by which organization they originated from.
Codemakers had suddenly outpaced codebreakers.
[The Kryptos sculpture outside CIA Headquarters. The NSA cracked
several of its codes before the CIA did. Image courtesy of Slate.com.]
The Office of Naval Intelligence wanted to take over from Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), demanding to see "everything" so they could do the job. They claimed SIGINT should limit their work to message translation, leaving interpretation to "the real experts." This sort of territorial gamesmanship would continue to hamper government organizations for decades to come.
And that demand to see everything? That probably sounds familiar, in light of the revelations about government data collection and the PRISM program that were revealed in Edward Snowden's leaks.
Black Friday was the start of all that, a shift from codecracking to the massive data collection and sifting operation that characterized the NSA for decades to come.
More amazingly, there was SO MUCH information collected during World War II that SIGINT was still poring over it all in 1949, decrypting what they could to reveal Soviet agents in the U.S. and England.
The fact that a high-ranking member of British Intelligence at the time, Kim Philby, was actually a Soviet double agent complicated things. After a decade under suspicion, Philby would flee to the Soviet Union in 1963, stunning many friends and colleagues who had believed in his innocence.
[The spy and defector, honored with a Soviet stamp.
Image courtesy of Britannica.com.]
Although the Russians had flummoxed SIGINT, other countries weren't so lucky. The East German police continued to use ENIGMA codes as late as 1956. Many of the early successes in the Korean War were tied to important decryption and analysis work by SIGINT. Those successes slowed in July of 1951, when North Korea began mimicking Russia's radio procedures, making it much harder to gain access to North Korean intel.
Finally, the chaotic scramble for control over signal-based data gathering and codebreaking between the government and the military resulted in the birth of the National Security Agency on November 4, 1952, by order of President Truman.
One of the first things the NSA did? Reclassify all sorts of material involving historical codebreaking, including books and papers dating back to the Civil War and even the American Revolution.
[The actual report that recommended the creation of the NSA.
The creation of the NSA had finally, for a time at least, settled the issue of who was running the codebreaking and signals intelligence operation for the United States. And they were doing fine work refining the art of encryption, thanks to the work of minds like mathematician and cryptographer Claude Shannon.
One of Shannon's insights was the inherent redundancy that is built into written language. Think of the rules of spelling, of syntax, of logical sentence progression. Those rules define the ways that letters are combined to form words (and those words form sentences, and those sentences form paragraphs, and so on).
The result? Well, if you know the end goal of the encoded string of characters is a functioning sentence in a given language, that helps narrow down the amount of possible information contained in that string. For instance, a pair of characters can't be ANYTHING, because letter combinations like TD, ED, LY, OU, and ING are common, while combos like XR, QA, and BG are rare or impossible.
By programming codecracking computers to recognize some of these rules, analysts were developing the next generation of codebreakers.
Unfortunately, the Russian line was holding. The NSA's failure to read much, if any, Soviet encrypted traffic since Black Friday was obviously becoming more than just a temporary setback.
Something fundamental had changed in the nature of the Russian cryptographic systems, and in the eyes of some scientific experts called in to assess the situation, the NSA had failed to keep up with the times.
I hope you're enjoying this look at the early days of America's 20th-century codebreaking efforts. Part 3 will continue next week, with the sea change from active codebreaking to data mining, plus Vietnam, the space race, and more!
Posted in PuzzleNation, Puzzles	| Tagged american codebreaking, Black Friday, Brain teaser, british intelligence, CIA, claude shannon, code warriors, codebreaking, codecracking, codecraft, cryptography, data mining, decrypt, DIY puzzling, east german police, east germany, edward snowden, encryption, Enigma, games, GC&CS, GCHQ, Geeking Out, Government Code and Cypher School, Government Communications Headquarters, kim philby, korean war, Kryptos, kryptos sculpture, National Security Agency, NSA, office of naval intelligence, Pop culture, president truman, Puzzle history, PuzzleNation, Puzzlin' fool, puzzly history, sigint, signals intelligence, spycraft, stephen budiansky, Truman, Wordplay, world war 2, world war ii	| 1 Reply
A puzzly British Christmas card!
Posted on December 24, 2015 by gmdirect
One government agency in England celebrates Christmas a little bit differently than most.
The GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding the Bletchley Park successes cracking the German "Enigma" code during World War II.
And for Christmas this year, they've released a puzzly Christmas card that's sure to challenge even the staunchest puzzlers.
Step 1 of the puzzle is a logic art puzzle where you have to deduce where to place black squares on an open grid in order to form a picture.
Each column and row has a series of numbers in it. These numbers represent runs of black squares in a row, so a 1 means there's one black square followed by a blank square on either side and a 7 means 7 black squares together with a blank square on either side.
Once you've solved this puzzle, you can use it to unlock the next puzzle in the chain.
From an article on GCHQ.gov.uk:
Once all stages have been unlocked and completed successfully, players are invited to submit their answer via a given GCHQ email address by 31 January 2016. The winner will then be drawn from all the successful entries and notified soon after.
Players are invited to make a donation to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, if they have enjoyed the puzzle.
This is one majorly challenging Christmas card. After you've conquered the logic art puzzle, you'll confront brain teasers, palindromes, pattern-matching, deduction, number progressions, codebreaking, cryptic crossword-style cluing, and more.
I would highly recommend teaming up with another puzzle-minded friend (or more) and trying your luck. Let us know how far you get! (And you can hit up this article from the Telegraph for aid as well.)
Posted in PuzzleNation, Puzzles	| Tagged Brain teaser, Christmas, Christmas card, Christmas Eve, codebreaking, cryptic, cryptic crossword, cryptography, deduction, England, games, GC&CS, GCHQ, Geeking Out, Government Code and Cypher School, Government Communications Headquarters, Holidays, Logic Art, morse code, number progressions, palindrome, pattern, pattern-matching, patterns, Pop culture, progressions, Puzzle to solve, PuzzleNation, Puzzlin' fool, Telegraph, Wordplay	| 1 Reply
Mira Modi + dice = safer passwords for all!
Posted on November 3, 2015 by gmdirect
Every time you sign up for a new website, email address, or social media account, you're reminded of one of the most curious aspects of modern life for an Internet user: the increasing complexity of passwords.
Whether you're being graded on the relative strength (or weakness) of your password based on its length or being required to include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks, or other symbols along the way, passwords are getting more and more complicated in the name of Internet safety.
This modern form of cryptography often leads to one of three results:
you use the same password over and over for everything (not safe)
you have to write down different passwords to every site in order to keep them all straight (also not safe)
you opt for a password-management service to handle them for you (a bit unwieldy)
Well, as it turns out, an 11-year-old girl named Mira Modi might have the answers to all your password needs.
Mira started a company called DiceWARE to create passwords that are both secure and easy to remember!
From her website:
The DiceWARE method creates strong passwords that are easy to remember but extremely difficult for hackers to crack. Passwords contain random words from the dictionary, such as: alger klm curry blond puck horse.
For the very affordable price of $2, Mira will create a six-word password just for you, send it to you by mail, and then encourage you to customize it however you see fit — capitalized letters, number replacement, etc. — so even she won't know your password when you're done.
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.
So, essentially, the same randomness that can make Yahtzee a delight or a challenge will decide each of your six words. It's ingeniously simple and designed to dissuade the usual hacking tricks.
Kudos to Mira for creating an affordable and immensely clever way to make our websurfing safer! This is puzzly thinking at its finest!
Posted in PuzzleNation, Puzzles	| Tagged cryptography, Cybersecurity, d6, dice, DiceWARE, DIY puzzling, Geeking Out, internet security, Mira Modi, password, Pop culture, PuzzleNation, Puzzlin' fool, six-sided dice, Wordplay, Yahtzee	| 1 Reply