Silicosaurus

Me

How long have I been on Wikipedia?: Been reading for a few years and made a few small edits. Thought it was time to make an account (2011-02).
Used wikis before?: Several, with various engines, including the original.
Expecting to check in often?: No, sorry. I have IRL-NMIs to service.
Expecting to stick around?: Probably, but there are wikis I haven't been back to in a very long time.; Clearly I'm a Wikipedia:Sleeper account that woke up again. Silicosaur'us 13:38, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Links

My subpage(s)

Prove it?

Experimental Template:User committed identity with iterated SHA512. (I stashed the input my merely-not-public long term storage.)

Committed identity: 782ea2f54f5ad7204c7f7bc005c3646df4a3e56cadeaa27cfebef5319424b06e29a4b355497e04139c59d90f6e8033c1acb0f0d43b6763db68b3ea1ff794fcfd is an iterated SHA512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.

generated with

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Digest::SHA qw( sha512_hex );
use YAML 'Dump';
$|=1;
my $last = do { print "Initial secret: "; <STDIN> };
my $blurb = do { print "Per-iteration blurb: "; local $/; <STDIN> };
my %keep;
my $lim = 1E5;
for (my $i=0; $i<=$lim; $i++) {
  $keep{sprintf("%08d", $i)} = $last if $i == 0 || $i+10 >= $lim;
  # include trailing LF in hash, for commandline convenience
  # (echo -n INPUT | sha512sum) vs. (sha512sum<ret>INPUT<ret><ctrl-D>)
  $last = $blurb.sha512_hex($last)."\n";
}
print Dump(\%keep);

Lost?

I don't remember making this thing and have no idea where I would have put the other end of it. Probably it's not useful any more? Another accidental Crypto-shredding. -- Silicosaur'us 11:40, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Why iterate?

It solves the problem where I give the hash input to somebody, and after that have nothing left to offer. With this, I can afford to give away an input about once per hour for ten years.

In the example above, I can reveal

My real name is Bob.
I live in my house.
I can release one hash per hour, starting 2011-02-25t00:00:00 +0000
81a1551ab4823f62eeeb2baae62bb0366da42d9f8850eb4453188368d3ec110d3fb5253d87fd81e3369d5e78c13eaa890d4314ed05ec4476de56b189945bc222

which you can paste into sha512sum to verify, and then again with the previous (eff3cf7a53d6d43b20948bfdd811f384727704664f5e04949bbe3e1de8dc939ae4a8f5244f9731f5b38702cafde803976d368fa4c5df05c27a7663d3d8eb5ca1) item in the chain. My chain of inputs here is only 10⁵ long because this laptop is slow and I'm impatient, but it's enough.

Each step has the same human-readable input. Maybe the timestamp line should change?

This scheme would need a small program to verify conveniently, anyway. It also needs an extra secret, right at the start of the chain.

Problems remaining

Many problems with this scheme are discussed at Template talk:User committed identity. I guess I will join in later.