🔐 Chomsky - A Grammatical Passphrase Generator 🔐

What's Going On?

Chomsky is a passphrase generator modeled on Chaerea with the same core principles:

1. People will use the password that works for them. Obviously.
2. People remember words and phrases more easily than letters, numbers, and symbols. (see xkcd 936 - correct horse battery staple)
3. People have a hard time choosing things "randomly". (see Bad at Entropy)

And it adds a another:

4. People will recognize (and remember) a phrase that is grammatically well-formed.

This added principle is an unproven assumption. Regardless of how well it works, this approach certainly divides a main word list into smaller lists by part of speech, which requires a longer passphrase to reach the same level of security that Chaerea provides. Safety not guaranteed, your mileage may vary, etc.

The Settings

Default settings are meant to balance security with memorability.

• Number of words: Default is 5, minimum 3, maximum 6. Longer is more secure but more likely to exceed a system's maximum password length.
• Separator: Default is "-", but can be any string up to 4 characters long.
• Include number: Default is "At the end". Satisfies password systems that require a number.
• Template: Default is "adjective adjective noun verb adverb". This should produce a grammatical result most of the time, though not all combinations will. All nouns are plural which should make them in agreement with all the verbs.

Word lists are based on the "Short list" from Chaerea, which itself is based on the "3esl" list from the 12dicts project that makes lists of common English words by comparing multiple dictionaries. Part-of-speech sorting was done by comparing against a dump of the Wiktionary database. All lists have been filtered to remove a variety of words that could be problematic for one reason or another.

• Plural Nouns: 8,689 core English nouns. Making nouns plural was a best-effort job and there may be mistakes.
• Adjectives: 3,746 core English adjectives.
• Verbs: 5,786 core English verbs.
• Adverbs: 926 core English adverbs.

Colorless what now??

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is a sentence by Noam Chomsky that demonstrates how humans can immediately recognize correct grammar even when the combination of words is meaningless. It appears in Chomsky's 1957 book Syntactic Structures which laid the foundation for much of modern linguistics and cognitive science. It also put a big dent in the radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner and the idea that you can teach kids how to talk by beating them, good riddance to that.

So if your passphrase is nonsense, don't worry; Noam Chomsky knows what you mean.