A simple tool to generate Diceware (XKCD-style) passwords, written in Swift.
Diceware automatically connects to the Internet to fetch a word list unless one is already cached, or a local file is specified on the command line. See "Word lists" below for more information.
You'll need Swift. You can get it from https://swift.org, or by installing Xcode if you're on a Mac.
Then simply run make. There are no other dependencies.
diceware
diceware word-count [wordlist-file-or-URL]
diceware --help
| Defaults | |
|---|---|
| # of words | 5 |
| Word list | EFF large wordlist |
Random numbers come from /dev/random. These are then converted to a range from 1 to 6 using Swift's Int.random(in: using:) method (using a straight modulus would skew the distribution), and the results are used like dice to pick a word from the list.
.----- die [1]
|.---- die [1]
||.--- die [2]
|||.-- die [5]
||||.- die [4]
11254 affidavit
The number of dice is determined by the file format. For example, the default wordlist has 5 digits, so 5 dice.
The word list must have the format 12345<tab>word. Blank lines are ignored, as are lines beginning with #.
The wordlist to use is automatically downloaded and cached. If no wordlist is given, it defaults to the EFF's large wordlist.
The download only happens if the wordlist isn't already cached from the last run; this will be once per wordlist, unless you clear your caches.
Wordlists are cached in ~/Library/Caches/diceware on OS X, and ~/.cache/diceware on other systems.
To prevent the initial download, you can obtain the default wordlist from somewhere and put it in the cache folder ahead of time. You'll need to create the diceware folder to put it in. (Wordlist caches use the filename from the server or local file, or the domain name if there is no filename.)