‘DiceKeys’ Creates a Master Password for Life With One Roll

guest · Aug 22, 2020

‘DiceKeys’ Creates a Master Password for Life With One Roll
A new kit leaves your cryptographic destiny up to 25 cubes in a plastic box
August 21, 2020
https://www.wired.com/story/dicekeys-cryptography/

MODERN CYBERSECURITY, DONE with properly paranoid best practices, requires meeting some tough demands: Carry a physical two-factor key to plug in and authenticate yourself on a new computer, but if you lose or break that tiny piece of plastic you could be locked out of your accounts.
Use different, totally unguessable passwords for every website, [...]—you'll need to remember a long master password for years, or risk losing access to the rest of them.

Or you could reduce all of that complexity to a single roll of 25 dice into a plastic box. This week Stuart Schechter, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, is launching DiceKeys, a simple kit for physically generating a single super-secure key that can serve as the basis for creating all the most important passwords in your life for years or even decades to come.

Perhaps most importantly, the box of dice is designed to serve as a permanent, offline key to regenerate that master password, crypto key, or U2F token if it gets lost, forgotten, or broken.
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"You just roll the dice," says Schechter, who presented DiceKeys in a talk at the Usenix Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security last week and is now offering preorders of the kits on Crowd Supply for $25, expected to ship in January of next year.

"Instead of having to enter a big secret when you want to do something that requires a super-strong password, you can just scan them in."
Thanks to the different numbers and letters on each key face as well as the dices' orientations, the resulting arrangement has around 196 bits of entropy, Schechter says, meaning there are 2^196 different possibilities for how the dice could be positioned.
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[...] Schechter says he sees it as a tool for people who want to adopt password managers and U2F tokens, but are intimidated by the prospect of forgetting a master password or losing a U2F token.

"It's definitely designed to make security more accessible to people, because it's something they can understand. It's a bunch of letters and digits in a box."
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EASTER · Aug 23, 2020

Interesting!

zapjb · Aug 23, 2020

I don't understand the part. Paraphrasing "if you lose the key you can recreate it". And generally it's all over my head & or not explained well.

XIII · Aug 23, 2020

If I understand it correctly you can recreate the key from a new scan of the dice.

However, this would also mean that you can never use the dice again after the first scan and need to make sure they forever remain in the same position in the box?

guest · Aug 24, 2020

Bruce Schneier is an advisor of this project.

DiceKeys
August 24, 2020
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/08/dicekeys.html

DiceKeys is a physical mechanism for creating and storing a 192-bit key. The idea is that you roll a special set of twenty-five dice, put them into a plastic jig, and then use an app to convert those dice into a key. You can then use that key for a variety of purposes, and regenerate it from the dice if you need to.

Here's the DiceKeys website and app. Here's a short video demo. Here's a longer SOUPS talk.
Preorder a set here.
Note: I am an adviser on the project.
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short video demo - "Introducing DiceKeys": https://vimeo.com/449522920
longer SOUPS talk - "Stuart Schechter’s 2020 SOUPS Talk on DiceKeys": https://player.vimeo.com/video/449676252

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