ietf-openpgp
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Re: Non-SHA-1 fingerprints

2009-05-05 18:19:51
On Tuesday 05 May 2009, David Shaw wrote:
On May 4, 2009, at 6:04 PM, Daniel A. Nagy wrote:
Also, since mobile phones typically have a numeric keypad, it would
be nice if
fingerprints and key IDs were numeric-only. It is an increasingly
important
platform for OpenPGP, I believe.

I think that is a good point and a great idea, but the only reason
that fingerprints and key IDs are printed in hex now is tradition.
There is nothing in the standard one way or another about how humans
should consume fingerprints.  You could even do it with the current
V4 fingerprints: just as my key fingerprint is
7D92FD313AB6F3734CC59CA1DB698D7199242560 in hex, it is equally
correct as 716901811312187285520504099705403090347495794016 in
decimal.  The big problem I see here is that's it's an awfully long
number to type into a mobile keypad.

Right. I do already have a hard time typing an unknown phone number with 
8 digits.

Since most mobile phones come with a camera nowadays the way to go is to 
take a picture of the fingerprint and then run some OCR on the picture. 
In fact, it would be much better to encode the fingerprint in some kind 
of easily scanable bar code (additionally to the common hex 
fingerprint) than as long string of numbers (similar to Semapedia).


Regards,
Ingo


P.S.: The mailing list software does not add a List-Post header (which 
is used for "Reply to List" by my MUA). Is it possible to fix this?

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