The reason I forwarded the message below is that many people find something familiar and accessible about emoji and will not understand why there should be more security concerns about them than about a bunch of bewilderingly similar and complex Chinese ideographs or a bunch of "dawn-of-time-emoji" aka Hieroglyphics, both of which are PVALID. That means that some consciousness-raising needs to happen somewhere and fast. A./ On 3/12/2018 9:41 AM, Asmus Freytag wrote:
We generally think of emoji as a poor choice for reliable identifiers.
Which makes this discussion on the public unicode mailing list somewhat interesting.
A./
PS: the discussion is archived https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2018-m03/0075.html
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: base1024 encoding using Unicode emojis Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 18:11:09 +0900 From: Martin J. Dürst via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> Organization: Aoyama Gakuin University To: Keith Turner <keith@deenlo.com> CC: unicode Unicode Discussion <Unicode@unicode.org>
On 2018/03/12 02:07, Keith Turner via Unicode wrote:
Yeah, it certainly results in larger utf8 strings. For example a sha256 hash is 112 bytes when encoded as Ecoji utf8. For base64, sha256 is 44 bytes.
Even though its more bytes, Ecoji has less visible characters than base64 for sha256. Ecoji has 28 visible characters and base64 44. So that makes me wonder which one would be quicker for a human to verify on average? Also, which one is more accurate for a human to verify? I have no idea. For accuracy, it seems like a lot of thought was put into the visual uniqueness of Unicode emojis.
Using emoji to help people verify security information is an interesting idea. What I'm afraid is that even if emoji are designed with distinctiveness in mind, some people may have difficulties distinguish all the various face variants. Also, while emoji get designed so that in-font distinguishability is high, the same may not apply across fonts (e.g. if one has to compare a printed version with a version on-screen).
Regards, Martin.
2018-03-11 6:04 GMT+01:00 Keith Turner via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org>:
I created a neat little project based on Unicode emojis. I thought some on this list may find it interesting. It encodes arbitrary data as 1024 emojis. The project is called Ecoji and is hosted on github at https://github.com/keith-turner/ecoji
Below are some examples of encoding and decoding.
$ echo 'Unicode emojis are awesome!!' | ecoji 🐦😱🔫🤜👢🔥🇮🐾💎🗓🔯🚜👖🚢🐙🌩💮🔪🎨🤚👥📤🌈📑
$ echo 🐦😱🔫🤜👢🔥🇮🐾💎🗓🔯🚜👖🚢🐙🌩💮🔪🎨🤚👥📤🌈📑 | ecoji -d Unicode emojis are awesome!!
I would eventually like to create a base4096 version when there are more emojis.