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Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

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Re: Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

#11
post #5

Neat! Melons and spruces! This almost triggers my Stack Overflow-honed reflexes to go on a huge rant about the fact that there are no "hex bytes" anywhere in your computer. But I guess the OP's author really does know that, and is just being colloqial. Still, it seems to create a lot of confusion among beginning programmers, so it's a somewhat unfortunate way of expressing things, in my opinion.

It's meant as a shorthand for "hex-encoded bytes".

Re: Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

#12
post #3

The mapping of only one byte to one symbol results in too many symbols in one fingerprint. Using more than 8 bits per symbol would result in something much easier to recognize. The goal should be "staple battery horse" and not "p k b t v r m n z x t c." Was my key "p k t b t v r m n z x t c" or was it "p t k b t v r n m z x t c," who can see the difference? However another danger is all the emoji that look too simila…

Knowing minor differences is likely to be unimportant. This really only matters if an attacker is able to generate a key with almost the same fingerprint. AFAIK, there is no way to do this. I do agree though that the string of emoji is still hard to memorize.

Almostness reduces the brute-forcing effort. It's not something to be hand-waved, programming to bruteforce just until it's "good enough" is easy. Once somebody learns that he doesn't have to carefully check the signature he won't check at all. The goal is to have as little to check as reasonable, but to check thoroughly.

Re: Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

#15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing minor differences is likely to be unimportant. This really only matters if an attacker is able to generate a key with almost the same fingerprint. AFAIK, there is no way to do this. I do agree though that the string of emoji is still hard to memorize.

Almostness reduces the brute-forcing effort. It's not something to be hand-waved, programming to bruteforce just until it's "good enough" is easy. Once somebody learns that he doesn't have to carefully check the signature he won't check at all. The goal is to have as little to check as reasonable, but to check thoroughly.

Agreed that this reduces the effort, but I'll believe it's easy when I see it :) In any case, I think OpenSSH randomart is likely to be more effective than the emoji approach.

Re: Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

#16
post #5

Neat! Melons and spruces! This almost triggers my Stack Overflow-honed reflexes to go on a huge rant about the fact that there are no "hex bytes" anywhere in your computer. But I guess the OP's author really does know that, and is just being colloqial. Still, it seems to create a lot of confusion among beginning programmers, so it's a somewhat unfortunate way of expressing things, in my opinion.

It's meant as a shorthand for "hex-encoded bytes".

You're really just interpreting bytes as characters in a different character set. "Visualizing hex bytes" suggests something slightly different, like using an emoji for each of the digits 0-9 and A-F (not much unlike the other proposals for writing hex digits, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bruce_Martin_hexadecimal_n... .)

Re: Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

#17
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. What you mean is that all bytes are hex bytes if you choose to look at them in hex, right?

No bytes are hex bytes. Bytes are bytes. You can display them however you like, even one byte as one emoji (what I argue to be too inconvenient representation in another message). But they are also not "emoji bytes." They are just bytes. As in "octets of bits," bit being a unit of information. And hystorically, the bytes weren't even necessarily octets, but some other group of bits.

This is semantics. For the record: I know what a byte is, and I am fully aware that numbers exist independently of any representation.

Re: Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

#18
post #3

The mapping of only one byte to one symbol results in too many symbols in one fingerprint. Using more than 8 bits per symbol would result in something much easier to recognize. The goal should be "staple battery horse" and not "p k b t v r m n z x t c." Was my key "p k t b t v r m n z x t c" or was it "p t k b t v r n m z x t c," who can see the difference? However another danger is all the emoji that look too simila…

For security purposes, it would probably be best to have something that hashes the key and displays it in a more human-parsable format like an identicon for verification. For a terminal, a generated phrase or sentence might be the best way to go; there are some stackoverflow posts about doing just that: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4683551/generating-a-pse...

For the more general case of analyzing binary data, I could see something like this being useful for other tasks such as visualizing network traffic, or analyzing logs. Basically finding some way to transform the data into an optimal form for human pattern recognition.

Re: Visualizing hex bytes with Unicode emoji

#20
post #5

Neat! Melons and spruces! This almost triggers my Stack Overflow-honed reflexes to go on a huge rant about the fact that there are no "hex bytes" anywhere in your computer. But I guess the OP's author really does know that, and is just being colloqial. Still, it seems to create a lot of confusion among beginning programmers, so it's a somewhat unfortunate way of expressing things, in my opinion.

I'm confused. What you mean is that all bytes are hex bytes if you choose to look at them in hex, right?

The tools for twiddling the bits of hex bytes are not always as readily available as those for Phillips or flathead bytes. Torx bytes are rarer still, and should be avoided.
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