QR code for public key sharing

[CMCDragonkai]

Original Author: robert-cronin

Just in case there are key-nodes no attached to human identities on keybase, we might be able to encode the public key in a QR code for easy scanning. This is a low priority once we get keybase integration in thought.

For example this is my keybase public key encoded in a pretty huge QR code, but it does seem to scan properly.

The quality seems to have reduced when uploading to github, I used this website for encoding: https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/
There are other QR code formats we could look into.

[CMCDragonkai]

Original Author: CMCDragonkai

We should have a general issue for the Keynode Profile.

[CMCDragonkai]

Original Author: CMCDragonkai

Given that we are thinking of cryptoforts avatars for Polykey, I wonder if they can be used instead of QR codes.

For higher density QR codes, we can use fountain codes combined with animation and colours.

See: https://github.com/divan/txqr

[CMCDragonkai]

Original Author: CMCDragonkai

We would need to shorten our public key quite significantly. Perhaps our base keys should be ed25519. Wireguard public keys are quite short, and we could use that as a basis for generating all subkeys. Then PK keys can be like Matrix keys.

@ning.zhang can you elaborate on the design of wireguard keys/relay keys and how we use ed25519 keys and how is wireguard able to use such short keys?

This may have some relation with our cryptoforts idea. I'm wondering if a new scheme can be developed for this purpose.

[CMCDragonkai]

Some more information:

»» ~
 ♜ nmcli device wifi hotspot                                                                                                                                                    pts/1 13:23:23
Device 'wlp45s0' successfully activated with '27e01493-b439-4c00-b248-e64a6d54c6a1'.
Hint: "nmcli dev wifi show-password" shows the Wi-Fi name and password.
»» ~
 ♖ nmcli device wifi show-password                                                                                                                                              pts/1 13:23:26
SSID: Hotspot-matrix-vostro-5402-1
Security: WPA
Password: VRdoqOP4

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It's possible to print QR codes on the terminal.

Also:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_detection_pattern
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function

Which can be useful in case we need to do labelling for authenticity like physical NFTs.

Other ideas are encrypted QR codes or secure QR codes, allowing it to only be read if the user has a the right key.

[CMCDragonkai]

ED25519 keys will allow us to have much smaller keys. And we can allow this to be easily used to create digital signatures too that can be printed or sent to any program to be further used.

Furthermore there's also micro QR codes which are much smaller, so they can be used for very small situations.