The way the dice rolls

Meet 11-year-old Mira Modi, who turned entrepreneur last month with a website where she sells cryptographically secure passwords for email accounts using the diceware method

In an age where we still see people using ‘123456’ as their passwords, 11-year-old Mira Modi has her own business of selling cryptographically secure passwords for email accounts. She uses diceware, a process where she rolls a six-sided dice 30 times to generate numbers that are then matched with the diceware list of words to bring about a 35-character password that is not just easy to remember but is also almost impossible to hack into. The sixth-grader — and now also an entrepreneur — in New York city may have created a stir internationally, but still finds it all hard to believe.

This journey began when Mira’s mother, award-winning journalist Julia Angwin, asked her to help out with research for her book, Dragnet Nation. Talking about her tryst with the dice, Mira says, “She paid me to roll the dice and soon enough, I was rolling the dice to make passwords for my grandparents and relatives. That’s when I got the idea of turning it into a business by creating a website,” she says and adds, “When I first explained the idea to my mom, she was very surprised!”

But Julia says, “I was a little worried and concerned about her privacy. I didn’t want her pictures to go up online, but soon after she launched the website, we have been getting so many orders and calls from people!” From just 30 orders last month (she launched the website on October 9), Mira today has 876 orders and counting. “My mother tweeted about it and it just went viral. In fact, the first few orders I got were from someone who sat across her at her workplace,” says the 11-year-old, who affirms that it has truly been an incredible journey so far, accompanied by many exclamations of “Oh my God” and “Is this really happening?!”. She has now also made her website international and a few days ago, received her first order from Taiwan.

While she initially received just two orders a day and charged $2 per password, today she gets over 100 orders on some days. Are there any possibilities of the price increasing? Julia answers, “With the number of orders we have been receiving, we were considering that,” but Mira chimes in to say, “I’m against it!” Mira sends in the passwords by US postal mail because it is the only secure way, where a third party would need a search warrant to open the sealed envelope. Also, she is already a famous personality in school. “I actually thought my friends wouldn’t be interested in it. But as it turns out, one of my friends, Sophia, also knew how to do this. Now, some of my friends also ask me to create passwords for them,” she tells us.

Mira takes about seven minutes to create each password, so on schooldays, she works only after she finishes her homework that she says “can sometimes be two hours long”. She also makes another surprising statement for a child of her age as she declares, “I actually like school.” And now her weekends are all about creating passwords too. “I set a goal for myself and try to complete it. It’s time consuming but I enjoy doing it,” she says while Julia adds, “When she started the business I thought I would have to do most of the work for her, but surprisingly she’s very responsible and has it all sorted out. She turns to me and says, ‘I’ve got it covered’.”

When she’s not in front of the computer, Mira loves to sing, does gymnastics and is also fond of baking. Her father, Vijay Modi — an IIT Bombay graduate originally from Ahmedabad — brings her, along with her brother Avinash and Julia, to India every year. And while Vijay calls Mira “an inspiration to youngsters in India”, Mira talks about her love for India in her own way as she shares, “I love the weather there. I’m not a food person but when I’m in India, I’m always eating. In fact, I spend time in the kitchen and help everyone make chapatis. I also love to wear traditional costumes for the dances I take part in.”

For this little girl, the journey has just begun. Ask her what she wants to be when she grows up and she responds, “A lawyer, because I’m good at arguing with people. Although it makes me sound very heroic, the idea of fighting against crime interests me.”

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