Wordlists¶

The passphrases generated by diceware naturally depend on the set of words used, the wordlists.

diceware comes with some wordlists out-of-the-box, that might be a good choice for usual private use.

By default we use a hand-crafted en_securedrop wordlist provided by @Heartsucker. It contains 8,192 english words and phrases. This list is based on the diceware standard wordlist and extended to offer better memorizable words. Please see https://github.com/heartsucker/diceware for details. The name en_securedrop refers to the securedrop project.

Apart from it we also provide the so-called 8k wordlist from Mr. Reinhold as published on http://diceware.com/. It also contains 8,192 english words and phrases and is something like the canonical wordlist for use with binary-geared entities like computers or nerds.

Warning

We do – by default – not use the diceware standard wordlist (which contains 7,776 words), because computers prefer powers of two and we use the Python standard lib random source by default (we do not want to waste entropy).

But the “original” list is included in diceware as well and you can pick it with the -w en_orig option. You should pick it when you use real dice as source of randomness.

You can pick another list with the -w or --wordlist option.

Add Own Wordlists¶

You can use any wordlist you like. Simply give the filename and it will be used:

$ diceware mywordlist.txt
HiHelloHelloHiHiHi

You can even pipe-in dynamic wordlists. Just use the dash - as filename:

$ cat mywordgenerator.sh | diceware -
HiHiHelloHiHiHello

for instance.

Of course you have to give the filenames of your files with each call to diceware.

But, if you want to store a wordlist persistently, you can do so too.

The wordlists we offer for use with diceware are all stored in a single folder. The exact location is output by --help at the very end:

$ diceware --help
...
Wordlists are stored in /some/path/to/folder

Just put your own wordlists into this folder (here: /some/path/to/folder) and rename the file to something like wordlist_MY_SPECIAL_NAME.txt. Afterwards you can pick your wordlist by running:

$ diceware -w MY_SPECIAL_NAME

diceware will use this file of yours then to create a passphrase. Please note that diceware only accepts files that are named like:

wordlist_NAME.txt

or:

wordlist_OTHER_NAME.asc

I.e. we expect wordlist_ at the beginning and some filename extension like .txt at the end. Furthermore names must not contain funny characters. In fact we accept regular letters, dashes, numbers, and underscores only. Files that do not follow these naming convention are ignored.

A list of all available wordlist names can also be retrieved with --help. See the --wordlist explanation.

Plain Wordlists¶

Out of the box, diceware supports plain wordlists, PGP-signed wordlists, and numbered wordlists. Plain wordlists look like this:

termone
termtwo
anotherterm

Each line in such a file is considered a word of the wordlist. Empty lines are ignored.

Whitespaces are allowed if they are not at the beginning or end of a line, stripped off otherwise.

Numbered Wordlists¶

Numbered wordlists contain numbers in each line, telling a sequence of dice rolls like so:

11111    aterm
11112    anotherterm
...

diceware detects such lines and in this case extracts aterm and anotherterm as wordlist entries.

PGP-signed Wordlists¶

PGP-signed wordlists are wordlists (ordinary or numbered ones), that have been cryptographically signed with PGP or GPG. They look like this:

and are normally stored with the .asc filename extension. Signed wordlists can be verified to detect changes, although this is not automatically done by diceware.

Warning

Diceware does not automatically verify PGP-signed files.