On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Brian Smith wrote:
Peter Palfrader wrote:
Nice idea. When trying to find decent backup methods for my
new Tor identity key I cam accross this thread.
I played all day with ocr and friends. In the course I wrote
a small script that does what you suggest. I
On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 01:48:02PM +0700, Brian Smith wrote:
Peter Palfrader wrote:
Nice idea. When trying to find decent backup methods for my
new Tor identity key I cam accross this thread.
I played all day with ocr and friends. In the course I wrote
a small script that does what
On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 12:59:00AM +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote:
On Mon, 28 May 2007, Peter S. May wrote:
Not meaning to kick a dead thread
This must be a zombie by now :)
Indeed. I'm very glad the thread woke up again, though, as it
reminded me that I had written some code for this back
On Mon, 28 May 2007, Peter S. May wrote:
Not meaning to kick a dead thread
This must be a zombie by now :)
I've come up with something which I haven't yet tried to implement but
which I think would be interesting to try. Let's call it proofreadable
base64. It's not terribly efficient, but
Peter S. May wrote:
After this, the first part of the
line is repeated, except it is as if it were filtered
through the command:
tr 'A-Za-z0-9+/=' '0-9A-Z+/=a-z'
That is, for every REGNADKCIN that appears
on the left side, there is
a H46D03A28D on the right side.
That's a clever
Casey Jones wrote:
That's a clever way of dramatically increasing the uniqueness of each
character to reduce the ambiguity of the OCR. It would be useful for
both error detection and error correction. If it could be integrated
into the OCR engine itself, it would be even more effective.
Not meaning to kick a dead thread, but this whole conversation has
gotten me thinking about how to produce an effective variant of base64
for paper storage. Base64 is an interesting solution because it fully
encodes raw data into what is effectively printable characters. It was
yet obviously not
Thanks for all the replies :)
I just tried OCR-A but with limited success. Will add in par2 and see
how things go with that.
2D barcode seems alot more suited to the problem, will report back on
how well that goes :)
And yes, the ctan ocr package does have +=-/
On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 07:55:55PM +0200, Johan Wevers wrote:
Well, I'm able to do some tests now with old backup CD's. All my old
backups are still perfectly readable, the oldest being from February
1998. I'll keep testing.
With modern equipment, not burning discs with maximum speed seems
Roscoe wrote:
I just tried OCR-A but with limited success. Will add in par2 and see
how things go with that.
That should be interesting.
I'm now leaning even more towards hex (base16) rather than base64. There
would be less opportunity for confusion for the OCR. I was thinking it
would be
On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 03:04:40PM -0700, Joseph Oreste Bruni wrote:
For example, the regular DSA+Elgamal secret key I just tested comes
out to 1281 bytes. The secret parts of that (plus some minor packet
structure) come to only 149 bytes. It's a lot easier to enter 149
bytes correctly.
David Shaw wrote:
They're certainly advertised to (I've seen some pretty incredible
claims of 100 years or more), but in practice it doesn't really work
out that way. The manufacturing of the media, the burn quality, the
burner quality, the storage, etc, all have an impact on how long an
optical
Of course, paper can also be eaten by bugs or mildew, which wouldn't
be interested in polycarbonate or Mylar.
The lesson here is that, regardless what medium you choose, let the
rated lifetime guide you in developing maintenance procedures but DO
NOT depend on it; take each volume out of the
James Cloos wrote:
Use the OCRA font. I did that in the past scaled so that the key used
up most of a single letter sized sheet of paper. I probably used mpage¹
or enscript² to do the conversion to PostScript (it has been a while :).
CTAN has metafont versions of OCRA and OCRB if you use
David Shaw wrote:
For paper to last 100 years is not even vaguely impressive. Paper
regularly lasts many hundreds of years even under less than optimal
conditions.
All seems rather academic to me as I would expect the current encryption
algorithms to be rendered useless by then.
Ben
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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Benjamin Donnachie wrote:
David Shaw wrote:
For paper to last 100 years is not even vaguely impressive. Paper
regularly lasts many hundreds of years even under less than optimal
conditions.
All seems rather academic to me as I would
On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 07:41:06PM +0100, Benjamin Donnachie wrote:
David Shaw wrote:
For paper to last 100 years is not even vaguely impressive. Paper
regularly lasts many hundreds of years even under less than optimal
conditions.
All seems rather academic to me as I would expect the
All seems rather academic to me as I would expect the current
encryption
algorithms to be rendered useless by then.
Not academic at all. If we know that paper will last for 2000 years
assuming just basic precautions, then we know that the lifetime of
our media will not be the limiting
On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 10:24:51PM -0500, Ryan Malayter wrote:
On 5/16/07, Peter Todd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Then only that
passphrase needs to be securely stored and the secret key can be stored
with standard backup procedures.
I believe the originally posted question centered around
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David Shaw wrote:
Most of the storage media in use today do not have particularly
good long-term (measured in years to decades) retention of data.
If and when the CD-R and/or tape cassette and/or hard drive the
secret key is stored on
On 5/17/07, Andrew Berg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Aren't optical discs supposed to last for many decades if stored
properly and almost never used?
Theory and practice are often far apart. The price of CD media has
dropped so low that quality is often an issue. CDfreaks has many
articles about
On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 09:07:13AM -0500, Andrew Berg wrote:
David Shaw wrote:
Most of the storage media in use today do not have particularly
good long-term (measured in years to decades) retention of data.
If and when the CD-R and/or tape cassette and/or hard drive the
secret key is
David Shaw wrote:
Most of the storage media in use today do not have particularly
good long-term (measured in years to decades) retention of data.
If and when the CD-R and/or tape cassette and/or hard drive the
secret key is stored on becomes unusable, the paper copy can be
used to restore
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: RIPEMD160
Ryan Malayter wrote:
Aren't optical discs supposed to last for many decades if stored
properly and almost never used?
Theory and practice are often far apart. The price of CD media has
dropped so low that quality is often an issue. CDfreaks
For paper to last 100 years is not even vaguely impressive. Paper
regularly lasts many hundreds of years even under less than optimal
conditions.
As an example, the modern paper ballot is about 2,200 years old. The
reason why we know this is we keep finding them. They practically
litter
If you want reasonably accurate data from OCR of scans of fonts not
specifically designed for OCR then you need to proofread the output
and correct as necessary. Outside of tightly controlled
circumstances, OCR is not going to be fully reliable without this
step.
I keep a paper copy of my
On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 09:07:35AM -0500, Ryan Malayter wrote:
I would suggest using plain old base64 ASCII and a large version of a
font like OCR-A or OCR-B. You can include par2 information, also
base64 encoded, but finding software to use that data for recovery may
be difficult many years
Fingerprint:
C54A C9DD 84AD C6FC D343 67C4 5195 D63A CD55 18C7
On Wednesday, May 16, 2007, at 12:44PM, David Shaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 09:07:35AM -0500, Ryan Malayter wrote:
I would suggest using plain old base64 ASCII and a large version of a
font like OCR-A or
On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 03:28:24PM -0400, David Shaw wrote:
One trick that can be done when paper escrowing OpenPGP keys is to
only print the part you care about. OpenPGP secret keys are heavily
padded with non-secret data. In fact, the secret key contains a
complete copy of the public key.
On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 09:20:18PM -0400, Peter Todd wrote:
On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 03:28:24PM -0400, David Shaw wrote:
One trick that can be done when paper escrowing OpenPGP keys is to
only print the part you care about. OpenPGP secret keys are heavily
padded with non-secret data. In
On 5/16/07, Peter Todd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Then only that
passphrase needs to be securely stored and the secret key can be stored
with standard backup procedures.
I believe the originally posted question centered around long-term key
storage, for which magnetic and optical media are
Hey folks,
I'm wanting to store my OpenPGP key on paper, I suspect this is
something someone else has already done. The motivation behind this is
that paper is the most stable backup medium I have.
I have tried printing out a key, then scanning and using gocr on the result.
That was
Know of a system that can take binary data and output an image to be
printed out, that is then capable of extracting that binary data from
an imperfect scan of the image.
QR coding is pretty nice. 3kb of binary storage per bitmap, and it's
an international standard: ISO/IEC 18004. There
Roscoe wrote:
Does anyone :
Know of a system that can take binary data and output an image to be
printed out, that is then capable of extracting that binary data from
an imperfect scan of the image.
The wiki page on barcodes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode
has a list of 2d barcodes
On 5/15/07, Casey Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
There appears to be an open source project going for PDF417
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF417
We've used PDF417 for conference attendee badges in the past. They
work well, and there seems to be quite a bit of hardware and software
out there to
How about bar code? I don't know long it would be to hold a key though.
That might exceed the capabilities of some bar-code scanners.
--
PGP Fingerprint:
C54A C9DD 84AD C6FC D343 67C4 5195 D63A CD55 18C7
On Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 12:23AM, Roscoe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hey folks,
I'm
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