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by e12e 3447 days ago
The reason I've been thinking about this, is that I'm not happy with diceware. Five words (64 bits of "guaranteed" entropy) is around 20 characters - and I'm not sure if diceware looses some entropy if you omit spaces (eg: "at hat" and "a that" both become "athat").

My main takeaway looking at the problem, is that 64 bits is a lot to encode in ~26 letters and maybe 10 digits - in a way that is easy to remember, easy to type, easy to read (if eg: given a printed initial password, read/hear (sharing over the phone/double as a way to read out a hash/shared key etc).

My main issue with diceware is the large number of words; almost touching on typical active vocabulary of even native speakers - never mind if your users speak little or no English. One benefit of the system above is that as long as you can come up with four/five sets of 128 words that don't collide among themselves in the groups of 128 - you can adapt the system to any alphabet and preserve any guarantees of entropy. Making a diceware wordlists is a huge undertaking by comparison. (But the benefit is that people have already done this for many languages).