Asfalis

A simple and secure passphrase generator.

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Inspiration

One of our teammates came up with the basis of the idea after reading this this comic :D about why passwords were worse than passphrases. Passphrases, or strings of randomly generated words, as statistics have shown, are significantly more secure than passwords as they offer more protection against both brute-force hacking and manual guessing. Passwords have evolved to become increasingly difficult for people to memorize, yet increasingly easy for computers to hack. It is reported that 25% of people opt to sacrifice the security of a password for reducing its complexity for the sake of memorability. Passphrases, on the other hand, are memorable, and not easily crackable. We agreed with those reasons and were inspired to make even better passphrases by generating a string of phrases from a selected non-English language, which would render dictionary attacks are rendered largely ineffective as well.

What it does

Asfalis (meaning "secure" in Greek) creates a secure passphrase for users by generating a random string of words according to the number of words they use and their selected language.

How we built it

We used these arrays on Spanish, English, and French words from npm. From there, we implemented a random string generator. We used javascript to fetch the collections of words from other files and to handle the randomization.

Challenges we ran into

For some of us, it was our first time working with CSS, HTML, and JS. It was also our first time working with translator APIs and npm packages. At first, we had trouble installing and calling the npm package an-array-of-English-words. The console kept on saying that require was not a function and the console would not print out the list of English words that the npm package said it was supposed to. Later on, the google translate API required us to use react. Not to mention, one of our members lived in a different time zone than the other two! Planning ahead and coming up with an idea that was both interesting and viable in the allotted amount of time was challenging as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to get the translator API working despite all of us either not knowing what they were or how to use them at the beginning of this project!

What we learned

We learned a lot about setting up domains and using npm packages. We're all beginners, and this was the first hackathon (and coding experience!) for one of our team members. F

What's next for Asfalis

We plan to broaden the number of supported languages for the passphrase generator to make it fun and accessible to a wider demographic of people who would like passphrases in their own native languages. In the future, we also plan to expand Asfalis to include comprehensive password-creation education and use it as a means to spark dialogue on the fundamentals of coding for kids, by explaining the reasons why the passphrases it creates are more secure than your standard password/ English passphrase.

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