I’m sure almost everyone has heard of XKCD Passwords by now. Several people on the internet may have also heard of diceware. After some digging, I did find a person who wrote up a method for using playing cards, but it doesn’t use a full deck of cards, and requires reshuffling after every card drawn. I found this rather unusable. Surely we can do better with a deck of cards?

Well, yes. Let me introduce what I’m going to call “cardware,” for want of creativity.

Using Cardware

Shuffle your deck (7 riffle shuffles), and draw 3 cards. Let’s take a look at an excerpt from the wordlist:

7c 4d 8s    nabla
7c 4d 9s    woodlawn
7c 4d 10s   edvard
7c 4d Js    grabbed
7c 4d Qs    genitive
7c 4d Ks    annum
7c 4d Ah    soma
7c 4d 2h    emitted
7c 4d 3h    dermot
7c 4d 4h    smoothly

The first card drawn in each of these is the Seven of Clubs. The other suits are similarly abbreviated; Spades, Diamonds, and Hearts. Number cards are pretty easy, but face cards need to be similarly abbreviated. So, we have Ace, Jack, Queen, and King. The word list is described with first card drawn on the left, last drawn on the right. If you drew a Seven of Clubs, a Four of Diamonds, and Ace of Hearts, your word would be “soma” (see the excerpt above).

Keep drawing sets of three cards until you have a long enough password. For low security accounts, 5 words is probably enough, but cryptography and other high-security applications should use more words.

Why should I do this?

First, we need to define what makes a “better” method of generating passwords. Diceware has a wordlist of 7,776 words with which it uses to create a passphrase. PCP, as the website I linked to calls it, uses a 10,000 entry wordlist. Both of these systems use a physical prop to generate “random” words from the wordlist. By picking multiple words, we can dramatically increase the number of passwords possible without increasing the length of the wordlist.

Mathematics can predict how many different passwords failing to shuffle the deck of cards each time will let us get. How long of a wordlist do we need? That depends on the number of ways we can draw n cards from a 52-card deck. This is just picking a n-permutation of a set of 52; shuffling the deck and drawing the first three cards in order is the same as picking three cards randomly, one at a time, preserving the order you drew them in. Permutations of n cards gives us the following numbers:

  • 3 cards: 132,600
  • 4 cards: 6,497,400

I’m not sure there’s 6.5 million words that people commonly use, but there is a list of 479,829 English words easily available. So, finding enough words is no problem. How many different passwords can we generate? Well, in terms of probability, there is no difference between drawing 3 cards twice without replacement and drawing 6 cards without replacement. So, let’s first list out how well diceware does:

  • 5 words: 2.8430 · 1019
  • 6 words: 2.2107 · 1023
  • 7 words: 1.7191 · 1027
  • 8 words: 1.3368 · 1031
  • 9 words: 1.0395 · 1035
  • 10 words: 8.0828 · 1038

PCP lists how many passwords it can generate on its site, but here’s a copy of the info as of time of writing:

  • 5 words: 1020
  • 6 words: 1024
  • 7 words: 1028
  • 8 words: 1032
  • 9 words: 1036
  • 10 words: 1040

Note that PCP is slightly less than an order of magnitude more passwords than diceware for the same number of cards.

Now, how well can we do if we use the full deck of cards, but don’t shuffle every time? Here’s the list, assuming you draw 3 cards per word:

  • 4 words: 9.8856 · 1019
  • 5 words: 5.8602 · 1024
  • 6 words: 2.7320 · 1029
  • 7 words: 9.8090 · 1033
  • 8 words: 2.6455 · 1038

So, we can basically cut off 1 word from diceware, and maintain or improve the number of passwords we could generate. That just leaves making a wordlist. For those that care, I posted the relevant code on github.

Now, there’s a bit of a problem once you get into really long chains of words. At some point, you need to shuffle the deck again, or you’ll be cheating yourself of extra password space. As you add words, the multiplier used to increase the number of passwords that could be generated decreases. Let’s look at the above list of number of passwords, written differently:

  • 4 words (52*51*50)*(49*48*47)*(46*45*44)*(43*42*41)
  • 5 words (52*51*50)*…*(40*39*38)
  • 5 words (52*51*50)*…*(37*36*35)
  • 6 words (52*51*50)*…*(34*33*32)
  • 7 words (52*51*50)*…*(31*30*29)
  • 8 words (52*51*50)*…*(28*27*26)

Remember, this is just permutations, which are based on factorials. While it looks like the multipliers used go down fairly quickly, moving from 7 to 8 words still increases the possible password space by over 19,000 passwords. However, somewhere in the 8-13 word mark, Diceware and PCP are going to start catching up, if you don’t shuffle your deck of cards. The approach outlined here should work well for at least 10 years, and it’s easy to just shuffle the deck of cards after a while.