On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 2:43 AM, Robert Ransom <[email protected]> wrote: > It can be difficult to copy or read (e.g. over a telephone) a long > sequence of characters, even if the sequence is punctuated into > several chunks of uniform length. [...] > > I have experimented with using pseudo-words of non-uniform length on a > single line; varying chunk lengths does seem to improve my ability to > read and copy strings.
Interesting observation... "Human useability" of public-keys (and fingerprints) is an important topic which needs more exploration. A lot of new end-to-end crypto protocols are using fingerprints as a primary auth mechanism, and de-emphasizing certificate or "web-of-trust" approaches. Yet feedback from the field is still kind of alarming, e.g. https://blog.crypto.cat/2014/01/cryptocat-at-the-openitp-dc-hackathon/ And there's a lot of open questions which useability researchers could help answer: Should we search for zero-prefixed fingerprints during key-gen, to shave off bits? Encode a version into fingerprint? Word lists vs. characters? How many characters? Which alphabet (base32? which version?) Which capitalization? Which chunk sizes? Which chunk separators? There's a "[email protected]" list set up and I think this would be a great topic to discuss over there, I'll try to get it started... Trevor _______________________________________________ Curves mailing list [email protected] https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/curves
