monotone-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[Monotone-devel] user-friendly hash formats, redux


From: Nathan Myers
Subject: [Monotone-devel] user-friendly hash formats, redux
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 20:36:51 -0800
User-agent: Mutt/1.3.28i

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 06:21:33PM -0500, graydon hoare wrote:
> perhaps we just need some more tab-completion, or to print out selectors 
> in more places in the UI's chatter, so people know they're valid. the 
> thing is, in a distributed system you need a content-based security 
> primitive like SHA1 hashes in place anyways -- since anyone can be lying 
> about the thing they associate with a particular external identifier -- 
> so I don't feel particularly wrong about using certs-on-hashes to 
> support this.

I've been thinking further about sayable, rememberable hash formats, 
and have discovered something that might be practical.  There are 
enough three-letter words and common names to encode ten bits apiece.  
This means that an SHA-1 hash expressed in hex as

  15fcbe9c9f966cb320a7d4d83e55f7380f979e7d

might be expressed by Monotone, instead, as

  JimBinDogHalFooLogHatJarBobLogWowManTicSawBagLet

It's a little bit longer than the hex, but not badly so.  Of course 
Monotone could parse it ignoring case, or enforce placement of any 
caps it sees.  The wordiness offers useful redundancy, too.  Four 
words gives you forty bits, extremely unlikely to collide, yet are 
easier to recall (or say) than six hex digits that yield only 24 
bits.  Although the choice of formats could be a command-line or 
configuration option, I don't see any real reason to retain the hex 
format.

If this seems useful enough, I'll make a word list.

Nathan Myers
address@hidden




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]