Description:

diceware 0.10

diceware
Passphrases to remember…
| documentation | sources | issues
diceware is a passphrase generator following the proposals of
Arnold G. Reinhold on http://diceware.com . It generates passphrases
by concatenating words randomly picked from wordlists. For instance:
$ diceware
MyraPend93rdSixthEagleAid
The passphrase contains by default six words (with first char
capitalized) without any separator chars. Optionally you can let
diceware insert special chars into the passphrase.
diceware supports several sources of randomness (including real life
dice) and different wordlists (including cryptographically signed
ones).

Contents

diceware

Install
Usage
What is it good for?
Is it secure?
Security Traps

Prefix Code
Reduced Entropy


Developer Install

Documentation Install
Creating the Man Page


Credits
Links
License


Changes

0.10 (2022-02-15)
0.9.6 (2018-12-19)
0.9.5 (2018-04-07)
0.9.4 (2018-02-27)
0.9.3 (2017-09-14)
0.9.2 (2017-09-14)
0.9.1 (2016-12-24)
0.9 (2016-09-14)
0.8 (2016-05-07)
0.7.1 (2016-04-21)
0.7 (2016-04-17)
0.6.1 (2015-12-15)
0.6 (2015-12-15)
0.5 (2015-08-05)
0.4 (2015-03-30)
0.3.1 (2015-03-29)
0.3 (2015-03-28)
0.2 (2015-03-27)
0.1 (2015-02-18)





Install
This Python package can be installed via pip:
$ pip install diceware
The exact way depends on your operating system.


Usage
Once installed, use --help to list all available options:
$ diceware --help
usage: diceware [-h] [-n NUM] [-c | --no-caps] [-s NUM] [-d DELIMITER]
[-r SOURCE] [-w [NAME [NAME ...]]] [--dice-sides N] [-v]
[--version]
[INFILE]

Create a passphrase

positional arguments:
INFILE Input wordlist. `-' will read from stdin.

optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-n NUM, --num NUM number of words to concatenate. Default: 6
-c, --caps Capitalize words. This is the default.
--no-caps Turn off capitalization.
-s NUM, --specials NUM
Insert NUM special chars into generated word.
-d DELIMITER, --delimiter DELIMITER
Separate words by DELIMITER. Empty string by default.
-r SOURCE, --randomsource SOURCE
Get randomness from this source. Possible values:
`realdice', `system'. Default: system
-w [NAME [NAME ...]], --wordlist [NAME [NAME ...]]
Use words from this wordlist. Possible values: `de',
`de_8k', `en_adjectives', `en_eff', `en_nouns',
`en_securedrop', `pt-br'.
Wordlists are stored in the folder displayed below.
Default: en_eff
-v, --verbose Be verbose. Use several times for increased verbosity.
--version output version information and exit.

Arguments related to `realdice' randomsource:
--dice-sides N Number of sides of dice. Default: 6

Wordlists are stored in <WORDLISTS-DIR>
With -n you can tell how many words are supposed to be picked for
your new passphrase:
$ diceware -n 1
Thud

$ diceware -n 2
KnitMargo
You can diceware additionally let generate special chars to replace
characters in the ‘normal’ passphrase. The number of special chars
generated can be determined with the -s option (default is zero):
$ diceware -s 2
Heroic%unkLon#DmLewJohns
Here "%" and "#" are the special chars.
Special chars are taken from the following list:
~!#$%^&*()-=+[]\{}:;\"'<>?/0123456789
Please note that several special chars might replace the same original
char, resulting in a passphrase with less special chars than requested.
With -d you can advise diceware to put a delimiter string
between the words generated:
$ diceware -d "_"
Wavy_Baden_400_Whelp_Quest_Macon
By default we use the empty string as delimiter, which is good for
copying via double click on Linux systems. But other delimiters might
make your passphrases more readable (and more secure, see
Security Traps below).
By default the single phrase words are capitalized, i.e. the first
char of each word is made uppercase. This does not necessarily give
better entropy (but protects against entropy loss due to non prefix
code, see Security Traps below), and it might
improve phrase readability.
You can nevertheless disable caps with the --no-caps option:
$ diceware --no-caps
oceanblendbaronferrylistenvalet
This will leave the input words untouched (upper-case stays upper-case,
lower-case stays lower-case). It does not mean, that all output words will be
lower-case (except if all words of your wordlist are lowercase).
As the default lists of diceware contain only lower-case terms, here
--no-caps means in fact lower-case only output, which might be easier to
type on smart phones and similar.
diceware supports also different sources of randomness, which can be
chosen with the -r <SOURCENAME> or --randomsource <SOURCENAME>
option. Use the --help option to list all valid values for this
option.
By default we use the random.SystemRandom class of standard Python
lib but you can also bring your own dice to create randomness:
$ diceware -r realdice --dice-sides 6
Please roll 5 dice (or a single dice 5 times).
Enter your 5 dice results, separated by spaces: 6 4 2 3 1
Please roll 5 dice (or a single dice 5 times).
Enter your 5 dice results, separated by spaces: 5 4 3 6 2
...
UnleveledSimilarlyBackboardMurkyOasisReplay
Normally dice have six sides. And this is also the default in
diceware if you do not use --dice-sides. But if you do, you can
tell how many sides (all) your dice have. More sides will lead to less
rolls required.
We support even sources of randomness from other packages. See the
documentation for more details.
diceware comes with an English wordlist provided by the EFF, which will be
used by default and contains 7776 (=6^5) different words. This list is
registered as en_eff.
Additionally diceware comes with an English wordlist provided by
@heartsucker, which contains 8192 different words. This list is based off
the original diceware list written by Arnold G. Reinhold.
You can enable a certain (installed) wordlist with the -w option:
$ diceware --wordlist en_orig
YorkNodePrickEchoToriNiobe
See diceware --help for a list of all installed wordlists.
You can also build phrases from adjectives and nouns (yet in english only)
using the included en_adjectives and en_nouns lists. For that you specify
these two wordlists after each other:
$ diceware -n 1 -w en_adjectives en_nouns
TediousPerimeter
These adjective/noun phrases might be easier to memorize.
If you do not like the wordlists provided, you can use your own
one. Any INFILE provided will be parsed line by line and each line
considered a possible word. For instance:
$ echo -e "hi\nhello\n" > mywordlist.txt
$ diceware mywordlist.txt
HelloHelloHiHiHiHello
With dash (-) as filename you can pipe in wordlists:
$ echo -e "hi\nhello\n" | diceware -
HiHiHelloHiHiHello
In custom wordlists we take each line for a valid word and ignore
empty lines (i.e. lines containing whitespace characters only). Oh,
and we handle even PGP-signed wordlists.
You can set customized default values in a configuration file
.diceware.ini (note the leading dot) placed in your home
directory. This file could look like this:
[diceware]
num = 7
caps = off
specials = 2
delimiter = "MYDELIMITER"
randomsource = "system"
wordlist = "en_securedrop"
The options names have to match long argument names, as output by
--help. The values set must meet the requirements valid for
commandline usage. All options must be set within a section
[diceware].


What is it good for?
Normally, diceware passphrases are easier to remember than shorter
passwords constructed in more or less bizarre ways. But at the same
time diceware passphrases provide more entropy as xkcd can show
with the famous ‘936’ proof:

The standard english wordlist of this diceware implementation contains 7776 =
6^5 different english words. It is the official EFF wordlist. compiled by
Joseph Bonneau. Therefore, picking a random word from this list gives an
entropy of nearly 12.9 bits. Picking six words means an entropy of 6 x 12.9 =
77.54 bits.
The special chars replacing chars of the originally created passphrase
give some more entropy (the more chars you have, the more additional
entropy), but not much. For instance, for a sixteen chars phrase you
have sixteen possibilities to place one of the 36 special chars. That
makes 36 x 16 possibilities or an entropy of about 9.17 you can add.
To get an entropy increase of at least 10 bits, you have to put a
special char in a phrase with at least 29 chars (while at the same
time an additional word would give you 13 bits of extra
entropy). Therefore you might think again about using special chars in
your passphrase.


Is it secure?
The security level provided by Diceware depends heavily on your
source of random. If the delivered randomness is good, then your
passphrases will be very strong. If instead someone can foresee the
numbers generated by a random number generator, your passphrases will
be surprisingly weak.
This Python implementation uses (by default) the
random.SystemRandom source provided by Python. On Un*x systems it
accesses /dev/urandom. You might want to follow reports about
manipulated random number generators in operating systems closely.
The Python API of this package allows usage of other sources of
randomness when generating passphrases. This includes real dice. See
the -r option.


Security Traps
There are issues that might reduce the entropy of the passphrase
generated. One of them is the prefix code problem:

Prefix Code
If the wordlist contains, for example, the words:
"air", "airport", "portable", "able"
and we switched off caps and delimiter chars, then diceware might
generate a passphrase containing:
"airportable"
which could come from air-portable or airport-able. We cannot
tell and an attacker would have less combinations to guess.
To avoid that, you can leave caps enabled (the default), use any word
delimiter except the empty string or use the en_eff wordlist,
which was checked to be a prefix code (i.e. it does not contain
words that start with other words in the list). The pt-br is also a secure
prefix code.
Each of these measures is sufficient to protect you against the
prefix code problem.


Reduced Entropy
Overall, diceware is a kind of mapping input values, dice throws for
instance, onto wordlist entries. We normally want each of the words in the
wordlist to be picked for passphrases with the same probability.
This, however, is not possible, if the number of wordlist entries is not a
power of dice sides. In that case we cut some words of the wordlist and inform
the user about the matter. Reducing the number of words this way makes it
easier for attackers to guess the phrase picked.
You can fix that problem by using longer wordlists.



Developer Install
Developers want to fork me on github:
$ git clone https://github.com/ulif/diceware.git
We recommend to create and activate a virtualenv first:
$ cd diceware/
$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.8 py38
$ source py38/bin/activate
(py38) $
We support Python versions 2.7, 3.4 to 3.9, and pypy.
Now you can create the devel environment:
(py38) $ python setup.py dev
This will fetch test packages (py.test). You should be able to run
tests now:
(py38) $ py.test
If you have also different Python versions installed you can use tox
for using them all for testing:
(py38) $ pip install tox # only once
(py38) $ tox
Should run tests in all supported Python versions.

Documentation Install
The docs can be generated with Sphinx. The needed packages are
installed via:
(py38) $ python setup.py docs
To create HTML you have to go to the docs/ directory and use the
prepared Makefile:
(py38) $ cd docs/
(py38) $ make
This should generate the docs in docs/_build/html/.


Creating the Man Page
We provide a ReStructuredTexT template to create a man page. When the
documentation engine is installed (Sphinx, see above), then you can create a
manpage doing:
(py38) $ rst2man.py docs/manpage.rst > diceware.1
The template is mainly provided to ease the job of Debian maintainers.
Currently, it is not automatically updated. Dates, authors, synopsis, etc. have
to be updated manually. Information in the manpage may therefore be wrong,
outdated, or simply misleading.



Credits
Arnold G. Reinhold deserves all merits for the working parts of
Diceware. The non-working parts are certainly my fault.
People that helped spotting bugs, providing solutions, etc.:


Conor Schaefer (conorsch)
Rodolfo Gouveia suggested to activate the --delimiter option.
@drebs provided patches and discussion for different sources of
randomness and the excellent pt-br wordlist. @drebs also initiated
and performed the packaging of diceware for the Debian platform. Many
kudos for this work! @drebs is also the official Debian maintainer of the
diceware package.
@heartsucker hand-compiled and added a new english wordlist.
dwcoder revealed and fixed bugs
#19, #21, #23. Also showed sound knowledge of (theoretical)
entropy. A pleasure to work with.
George V. Reilly pointed to new
EFF wordlists.
lieryan brought up the prefix
code problem.
LogosOfJ discovered and fixed
serious realdice source of randomness problem.
Bhavin Gandhi fixed the confusing error
message when an invalid input filename is given.
Simon Fondrie-Teitler contributed a
machine-readable copyright file, with improvements from @anarcat
Doug Muth fixed formatting in docs.


Many thanks to all of them!


Links

The Diceware home page. Reading definitely recommended!
fork me on github

External Wordlists:

Diceware standard list by Arnold G. Reinhold.
Diceware8k list by Arnold G. Reinhold.
Diceware SecureDrop list by @heartsucker.
EFF large list provided by EFF.
English adjectives and nouns lists provided by NaturalLanguagePasswords.



License
This Python implementation of Diceware, (C) 2015-2022 Uli Fouquet, is
licensed under the GPL v3+. See file LICENSE for details.
“Diceware” is a trademark of Arnold G Reinhold, used with permission.
The copyright for the Diceware8k list is owned by Arnold G Reinhold. The
copyright for the Diceware SecureDrop list are owned by @heartsucker.
Copyright for the EFF large list by Joseph Bonneau and EFF. Copyright
for the brazilian portuguese list by @drebs. Copyright for the english
adjective and noun lists by NaturalLanguagePasswords. See file COPYRIGHT for
details.



Changes

0.10 (2022-02-15)

Officially support Python 3.8 and Python 3.9.
Removed official support for pypy2, Python 2.6, and Python 3.3.
Allow to specify several wordlists in order to create syntactical valid
phrases.
Also added first wordlists with english adjectives/nouns to generate for
instance <adjective-noun> phrases that are easier to memorize.
When using real dice, allow entering of several rolls at once. Patch from
Adin Hoyle.
Added german wordlists.
Added carefully compiled brazilian portugese wordlist. Kudos to @drebs.
Removed original diceware wordlists temporarily, for containing bad terms (#85)



0.9.6 (2018-12-19)

Officially support Python 3.7.
Fixed #51: Fix to formatting of list in Wordlists section. Kudos to Doug
Muth.



0.9.5 (2018-04-07)

Fixed #28: use Debian-compliant, machine-readable copyright format. Kudos to
Simon Fondrie-Teitler and @anarcat.
Fixed #48: Clarify trademark status of diceware. Mr. Reinhold granted
permission to use the name ‘Diceware’ in this project and under the conditions
listed in the issue comments. Many thanks to him!



0.9.4 (2018-02-27)

Set default logging level to ERROR (was: CRITICAL)
Fixed #44: provide a short and readable file-not-found message (many thanks to
bhavin192)
Fixed #45: clean up logging handlers after test runs.
Removed date-dependent tests from default test suite. Run py.test -m ''
or tox to run them.



0.9.3 (2017-09-14)

Fix broken test.



0.9.2 (2017-09-14)

Fixed #33. Make en_eff the new default wordlist. This results in slightly
decreased entropy per word (12.92 bits instead of 13.0), but provides prefix
code and better memorizable words. Thanks to @anarcat for the suggestion.
Fixed #35. Make realdice source of randomness provide an equal distribution
of roll numbers even for sequences shorter than number of dice sides.
Added a man page.
Support Python 3.6.
Import ConfigParser instead of SafeConfigParser if the latter is an alias
of the former.
Fixed #37. Ensure file descriptors are closed properly.
Fixed #38. Get wordlists dir by function (instead of const) to allow
reproducible builds. Kudos go to @drebs, again.



0.9.1 (2016-12-24)

Fixed #32, in docs tell that --no-caps option does not generate
lower-case terms.
Fixed #31, broken realdice source of randomness. argparse related bug,
Bug was discovered and fixed by @LogosOfJ, thanks a lot!
Fixed #29. Tell about code prefix problem in README.
Activated logging. Using verbose will result in additional output.



0.9 (2016-09-14)

Added –dice-sides option to tell how many sides used dices
provide.
Changed API interface of get_config_dict() to allow more flexible
handling of config files.
Support different verbosity levels.
Added new wordlist en_eff. It is a 7776-terms list provided by
the Electronic Frontier Foundation. See
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-passphrases
for details. Thanks to George V. Reilly for hinting!
Fixed #27. Allow dashes in numbered wordlists. Yet, these looked
like 1234 myterm. We now also accept 1-2-3-4 myterm.



0.8 (2016-05-07)

Closed #23. @dwcoder provided a fix that allows use of
whitespace-only values in diceware config files if they are enclosed
in quotes.
Fixed #21. @dwcoder revealed and fixed (again!). This time –caps
and –no-caps settings did not work properly when set in CLI or in
.diceware.ini config file.
Shortened real-dice randomness source.
Added logger as common interface to send messages to users.
New dependency: sphinx_rtd_theme for generating docs. This theme
was formerly a dependency of Sphinx.



0.7.1 (2016-04-21)

Fixed #19. @dwcoder revealed and fixed a nasty bug in the real-dice
randomness-source. Thanks a lot!



0.7 (2016-04-17)

Added sample .diceware.ini.
Added new english wordlist en_securedrop. This is the new
default list. Thanks to heartsucker who compiled and added the list.
Remove support for Python 3.2. Several packages we depend on for testing
and sandboxing stopped Python 3.2 support. We follow them.



0.6.1 (2015-12-15)

Minor doc changes: add separate config file docs.
Fix docs: the default wordlist is named en. Some docs were not
up-to-date in that regard.



0.6 (2015-12-15)

Officially support Python 3.5.
Tests do not depend on pytest-cov, pytest-xdist anymore.
Support configuration files. You can set different defaults in a
file called .diceware.ini in your home directory.
Renamed wordlist en_8k to en as it serves as the default
for english passphrases.



0.5 (2015-08-05)

New option -r, --randomsource. We support a pluggable system
to define alternative sources of randomness. Currently supported
sources: "system" (to retrieve randomness from standard library,
default) and realdice, which allows use of real dice.
New option -w, --wordlist. We now provide several wordlists
for users to choose from. Own wordlists could already be fed to
diceware before. By default we still use the 8192 words list from
http://diceware.com.
Rename SRC_DIR to WORDLISTS_DIR (reflecting what it stands for).
Use also flake8 with tox.
Pass options to get_passphrase() instead of a bunch of single args.
Output wordlists dir in help output.



0.4 (2015-03-30)

Add –delimiter option (thanks to Rodolfo Gouveia).



0.3.1 (2015-03-29)

Turned former diceware module into a Python package. This is to
fix bug #1 Wordlists aren’t included during installation, this time really.
Wordlists will from now on be stored inside the diceware package.
Again many thanks to conorsch who
digged deep into the matter and also came up with a very considerable
solution.
Use readthedocs theme in docs.



0.3 (2015-03-28)

Fix bug #1 Wordlists aren’t included during installation . Thanks to conorsch
Add –version option.



0.2 (2015-03-27)

Minor documentation changes.
Updated copyright infos.
Add support for custom wordlists.



0.1 (2015-02-18)

Initial release.

License

For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.

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