This 11-year-old Indian-origin girl makes money selling secure passwords

Those dices have been an integral part of our growing-up days. Remember the fun? But when 11-year-old Mira Modi throws the dice, that’s not for fun. She does real business with it and gets some serious work done.

This Indian-origin girl, residing in United States of America (USA), manually creates six-word Diceware passphrases for you that are easy to remember but difficult to crack. Thus she makes sure no hackers break into your accounts and steal data.

But how does she do this?

She uses Diceware that is known as a decades-old system for generating passwords. She rolls six-sided dice to get random numbers (Passphrases created in this way are tough nut to crack as they contain a lot of entropy). Then she matches them to a long list of English words and combines these words into a non-sensical string. Bingo! That’s it! She sells it for $2 a pop.

This is her first business (other than those occasional lemonade stands!).

It all started when Mira’s mother, Julia Angwin, a veteran journalist and author of Dragnet Nation, asked her to come up with Diceware passphrases as part of her research for the book. That piqued her curiosity and she started being a regular at many of the events related to the book and the subject. It is there when she began selling passwords in-person. Seeing the response, she finally thought of starting a small business out of it.

And she has got those smarts for it. She writes in her website: “I started this business because my mom was too lazy to roll dice so many times, so she paid me to make roll dice and make passwords for her. Then I realized that other people wanted them, too.”

“I wanted to make it a public thing because I wasn’t getting much money,” she said in an interview. “I thought it would be fun to have my own website.”

This wunderkind is a sixth grader but you have to agree, she is way ahead of her peers and all those who still think ‘123456’ is a tell-all genius.

“I think (good passwords are) important. Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly,” she said. “We have so much more on our social media. We post a lot more social media—when people hack into that it’s not really sad, but when people (try to) hack into your bank account or your e-mail, it’s really important to have a strong password. We’re all on the Internet now.”

Mira thinks it would be “really cool to learn about hacking and digital security.” She has a clear understanding of crucial security which even adults sometimes tend to overlook.

She warns us: “If you just make one up, it’s not going to be a very good one.”

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