Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

Te Reo Maori to prevent hackers

hackerUsing a Creative Commons Aotearoa list of Māori words from Te Ngutu Kura, Taipo and Indigenous developer has created a Māori Diceware word list to create pass phrases. The instrucitons and download can be found here https://github.com/Taipo/MaoriDiceware

 

This list can be used for kura kaupapa, kura, whanau, iwi and hapu to generate secure passphrases that will make any attempt by hackers increasingly difficult.

 

I would suggest that the list could also be used by adding family members names, wahi tapu names, tribal dialect and any other names and words which are probably not published and easily accessible to also be included in your own personal list.

From Wikipedia “passphrase is a sequence of words or other text used to control access to a computer system, program or data. A passphrase is similar to a password in usage, but is generally longer for added security. Passphrases are often used to control both access to, and operation of, cryptographic programs and systems. ” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passphrase

 

In addition to the Māori Diceware list, you could think of a sentence in te reo and then use a letter and symbol from each word mixed up with numbers to create smaller passwords, or use the diceware instructions and make up a password from the list. Other ideas are to use patterns of words from whakapapa or even whakapapa mixed with numbers and symbols as these are not likely to be in a dictionary attack or easily guessed.

Many people, especially Māori online do not realise how often random hack attacks occur. This web site receives about 6 random attempts to hack it via a common method each day, normally at night from countries overseas. They are likely not targeted and are random technology scans that look for specific systems and use public vulnerabilities and weak passwords.

In the future we will likely see concentrated cyber attacks on Iwi as their wealth an influence become increasingly larger. Such social justice attacks are becoming more popular and are becoming an issue that is now raised and considered at board tables.

Perhaps some of the most popular and well known social attacks were the Sony Pictures and the Snowdon wiki leaks of which Iwi can and should learn from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

I first talked about this and the benefits of Open Source at the Open Source Open Society conference held in Wellington in April 2015.

DISCLAIMER: This post is the personal opinion of Dr Karaitiana Taiuru and is not reflective of the opinions of any organisation that Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a member of or associates with, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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