Generate Strong Passwords with Irish Diceware

What is Diceware?

Diceware passwords are a simple way to build very strong passwords. When I first heard about them I thought it was just too easy to be safe. In my head, the ideal password was a 32 character long password with a completely random combination of upper, lower and special chars. I think this is due to an error in our cognition; we impose our cognitive constraints on to computers; if its hard for us to remember, it’s hard for a computer to guess. So if it’s easy for us to remember, it must be easy for a computer to guess. But my intuitions were wrong here.

The idea for a diceware password is:

1. Roll five six-sided dice.
2. Use the sequence of numbers (e.g. 53421) to look up a word in a Diceware wordlist.
3. Repeat several times to build a passphrase.

Each roll should be truly random, because you’re using a physical real world dice. There are 7776 ($6^5$) words in your word list, and every additional word in the word list combines, multiplies and makes your password stronger.

Why Irish?

Most Diceware lists are in English. I wanted to experiment with Irish-language words. The Irish language has very very few speakers. There is also likely no person on the planet who speaks only Irish as their first language. But from an aesthetic point of view I like it. My grandmother was a native speaker; and within a single generation the language died in our family. Maurice Barrès’ ‘la terre et les morts’ is basically my feeling here. But even just from a security point of view it’s interesting, since there are different words and words that contain fadas (á, é, í, ó, ú); which should boost the entropy a bit.

However, one of the issues you will face if you use the fada list is that many of the password rules for major sites do not allow characters like this. Luckily Irish has lots of words without any fadas and so you can use these instead.

The Irish Diceware List

I created a list of 7,776 common Irish words (length 3–9, no hyphens or apostrophes, normalized to lowercase). Each entry is mapped to a five-digit dice code.

Download diceware_irish_7776.tsv

Download the no fada version diceware_irish_nofada_7776.tsv

Format:

11111    focal
11112    madra
11113    teach
...

How to Use It

Option 1: Physical Dice

I highly recommend you use this option if you plan to use this in practice for anything important.

1. Get five six-sided dice.
2. Roll them all at once (or one die five times).
3. Record the sequence (e.g., 45263).
4. Look it up in the Irish Diceware TSV file.
5. Repeat 6–8 times to build a passphrase.

Example:

Rolls: 45263 → bruach
Rolls: 16325 → solas
Rolls: 22546 → geal
Rolls: 66141 → cairde
Rolls: 34316 → leabhar
Rolls: 54452 → brón

Final passphrase:

bruach solas geal cairde leabhar brón

That’s six random words — extremely secure (≈ 77 bits of entropy) but easier to remember than P@$$w0rd!123.

Write the passphrase down on a piece of paper if you have to. I highly recommend destroying the paper (lighting it on fire, do not bin it). Or if you feel uncomfortable with that, then store it in a very secure location.

Option 2: Command Line

If you don’t have dice handy, you can use a random number generator on your computer. For example, in Linux/macOS:

shuf -n 6 diceware_irish_7776.tsv

This selects 6 random entries from the list.

However I do not recommend this way for anything important. Firstly you do not know how random the generator is. Secondly you do not know how compromised your computer generating the pass phrase is. Just avoid it.

Option 3: Password Managers

Most password managers will let you generate pass-phrases. However this is often only allowed in english, or whatever language you’re using. There is likely no support for Irish. So in this case, you could use an Irish pass-phrase for some of the important things, and then use the generated ones for the day to day stuff.

Tips & Considerations

• Number of words: 6 words is usually enough, 7–8 if you want extra margin.
• Fadas: As I said before, you may run in to issues with using non standard characters like this. If you can use them great. But you will likely be unable to on important sites like google for example.
• Don’t reuse: never recycle the same passphrase across different accounts. You should also consider cycling pass-phrases every so often.
• Backup: Creating a passphrase in a language that is not your native might be dangerous. If it’s very important, but you also will use the password very infrequently, then store it somewhere very safe. If you use it frequently, then consider destroying the written evidence.