I guess I should also talk about my Diceware passphrase project. I built the first draft of that project many years ago as a modernized and web-based version of the Diceware password approach–rolling dice (for randomness) that correspond to common English words to generate high-entropy passphrases.
Well, I’m still at it, and just last week I authored some changes that bring Diceware into the 2020s. Aside from doing code cleanup and removing some things that were unused, because all modern browsers now ship with cryptographically secure random number functions, I was able to drastically reduce the size of the bundle.js file that ships with Diceware. Here are some cool numbers:
- Old size: 735 K
- New size: 8 K
Only 8 K, that’s it! Nearly a 99% in file size reduction. That’s huge!
Since deploying this change, I’ve done tests over my cellphone, and it’s amazing how the load time for the entire app went from ~3-5 seconds to well under 1 second. It’s probably one of the cooler things I’ve done recently, because the speedup is just astonishing.
If you want to play around with Diceware, the site is here. And if you want to see my source code, that’s over here.
Enjoy!