What is the point of a public key fingerprint?

Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by rainsford on Saturday December 16, 2023 @07:20PM (#38669157)

The interesting thing about that is that while a fairly impressive number of the beginning and end values match, a trivial side-by-side comparison glance makes it clear they don't match even if you don't directly compare any of the digits. I think humans are actually pretty good at this task if they approach it more like humans than machines and just give the two values a quick glance with the intent of spotting differences rather than a nibble by nibble comparison.

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by rezonant on Saturday December 16, 2023 @09:04PM (#38669723)

On the other hand, I initially thought this was a collision until a second glance :-S

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by tonyarkles on Sunday December 17, 2023 @12:37PM (#38674596)

Yup. Me too.

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by lxgr on Sunday December 17, 2023 @01:03AM (#38670699)

True, if you can do a side-by-side comparison! On a mobile device, switching between apps and manually comparing, it would have probably fooled me.

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by danmur on Sunday December 17, 2023 @03:20AM (#38671229)

For sure, I often just look at the beginning and end

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by Dalewyn on Sunday December 17, 2023 @01:12AM (#38670742)

> a trivial side-by-side comparison glance makes it clear they don't match

A "trivial, side-by-side comparison glance" would lead me to believe the two number strings are the same. If I'm just glancing I'm not going to take care to read each and every character out and compare them, that's not what glancing means.

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by eviks on Sunday December 17, 2023 @03:43AM (#38671340)

The best such method is dynamic comparison when the position of each string is the same, you just change the value, this also works for pictures, much easier to spot the deference vs having to glance back and forth

Though for this specific case of only needing to check for identity, no human comparison should be involved, copy&search to see if the other is a match if you have no better tools

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by painted-now on Sunday December 17, 2023 @03:59AM (#38671420)

My favorite way of comparing "things" is to put them next to each other and then use the exact same technique one uses for viewing those "Magic Eye" stereograms [1]. With that you basically overlay both sides and where it doesn't match, you just see the difference.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by oniony on Sunday December 17, 2023 @06:14AM (#38672068)

Interesting. I use `diff`.

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Re:What is the point of a public key fingerprint? by painted-now on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @04:01PM (#38713587)

Well yeah, if I can copy and paste stuff I do that too :-)

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