A Diceware Kit for Other Languages
Diceware passphrases are fairly easy to remember if you speak
English. Speakers of other languages would find it helpful if there
were Diceware lists available for their languages. Here are some
instructions for people who wish to create such lists. All you really
need is 7776 short words. From a security standpoint it doesn't
matter what they are as long as they are all different. We belive
that keeping the words as short as possible improves the likelihood
that actual users will employ a passphrase with enough words for good
security.
To that end we included in the original Diceware list many short
character combinations that are not words, but are easy to remember.
Such combinations are contained in the file dicewarekit.txt. It
includes 992 letter and number strings, all 4 characters or less,
including:
- All single letters
- Each possible pair of letters ( aa, ab, ac, ..., ba, bb, bc,
...)
- Each letter repeated 3 times and 4 times (aaa, aaaa, bbb,
bbbb, ...)
- All one and two digit numbers
- Easy to remember 3 and 4 digit numbers (456, 1000, etc)
- Simple special character strings
If you wish to follow this approach, here are suggested steps for
doing so:
- Download the file
dicewarekit.txt.
- If you wish to add letter combinations in your language that
are not in the 26-character Roman alphabet, you of course may do
so, but consider whether they will be available on all keyboards
that your users will have.
- Get a list of the words in your language. You will need to add
about 6784 words from your language. Exercise some judgement as to
what is appropriate in your language. We suggest removing all
offensive words.
- Open that list in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft
Excel or AppleWorks
- You may want to add short abbreviations that would be familiar
to speakers of your language and some ordinal numbers, if
appropriate (We included "1st", "2nd", "3rd", ..., "100th" in the
English list)
- Create a column that contains the length of each word
- Sort the spreadsheet by length
- Delete words with two or fewer letters (all one and two letter
combinations are in dicewarekit.txt)
- Depending on the language, you may find that there are enough
words if you only use 3, 4, 5 and 6 letter words. For some
languages you many need seven letter words.
- Remove the most obscure of the longest words until your list
is about 6850 words long. (You should have a few extra since there
may be some words duplicated in dicewarekit.txt)
- Open the dicewarekit.txt file in your spreadsheet program
- Paste your language list at the end of the dicewarekit.txt
list in one column
- Sort the column.
- Check for duplicates by adding a column that tests if the cell
below equals the current cell [e.g. =IF(A2=A1,"xxxx","")] then
sort on that column.
- Remove any duplicates
- Trim the list so it contains exactly 7776 words. Your list is
now done. Congratulations!
To add the dice numbering, open the classic Diceware word list in
your spreadsheet program and replace the English word list column
with your word list.
To create an 8192 (2**13) word list, download the file
diceware416.txt and add its
contents to your list; then resort.
Finally, if you post your list on the Internet, be sure to let us
know so we can add a link from the Diceware site.
Good luck!
2001-5-8