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Correct Horse Battery Staple: The Book is a handmade pocket reference for creating passphrases by rolling dice and looking up words—not a ready-made password or a currently verified product for sale. The useful idea is the random selection method: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) now recommends six randomly chosen words for most applications, rather than relying on the familiar four-word example.
What is Correct Horse Battery Staple: The Book?
In a February 9, 2017 project description, Hackaday’s Brian Benchoff featured a pocket-size book made by a maker identified as m145mcc. It was assembled from a printed EFF passphrase word list using a laser printer, glue, thread and card stock. A die and the printed list let its owner select words to form a passphrase. The book is a handmade project, not evidence of a commercial edition currently available for purchase. Hackaday’s project description says the list contained 7,776 words and was based on Arnold Reinhold’s Diceware list with modifications, including the removal of vulgar, numeric, rare and unusual words.
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How to make a passphrase with dice and a word list
EFF’s guide, revised July 22, 2024, recommends making a six-word passphrase from its long word list for most applications. For each word, roll five dice, write down the five digits in order, and use that number to find the corresponding entry in the list. Repeat until you have six words. The dice matter: choosing words yourself—even words that seem unusual—does not provide the same randomness.
- Get EFF’s long word list and diceware instructions from EFF’s Diceware page.
- Roll five dice and record the result in order as a five-digit number.
- Look up that number in the list and write down the corresponding word.
- Repeat the roll-and-lookup process until you have six words.
- Create a mnemonic to help remember the phrase, as EFF suggests, without changing the randomly selected words.
EFF’s illustrated six-word method has 221073919720733357899776 possible phrases (about 2⁷⁷), according to its guide revised July 22, 2024. That figure describes the possible six-word combinations in the illustrated method; it is not the number of entries in the list, nor a guarantee that every use is secure.
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Why the familiar four-word phrase is not a universal recommendation
“Correct horse battery staple” is widely recognized as an example of a memorable passphrase, but familiarity with that phrase does not make it a good password to copy. EFF’s border privacy guide cautions that a phrase of this length may not withstand specialized cracking tools or machines; a stronger phrase would be longer or use a larger word list. EFF’s current general guidance instead recommends six randomly selected words for most applications. EFF’s password guidance also recommends at least six words for disk encryption and a password manager’s master passphrase.
Randomness is central. A person who picks words based on what sounds memorable may create a sequence that attackers can guess more easily than one selected by dice. The method helps make word selection unpredictable; it cannot protect a phrase that someone sees, obtains from an insecure note, or learns through disclosure. Avoid treating any passphrase as “uncrackable.”
When a passphrase or password manager makes sense
A long, randomly generated passphrase can be useful when you need to remember one important secret, such as a password manager’s master passphrase or a disk-encryption password. For other accounts, EFF recommends using a password manager to generate and store unique credentials, rather than reusing a passphrase or password. This separates the job of remembering one master secret from the job of creating distinct passwords for many services.
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