Re: Memorizing a 128 bit / 256 bit hex key

Stefan Claas <pollux@tilde.club> wrote:

You thoughts please, gentlemen.
 
Let's say you travel and do not want to store your secret hex key on
your device and recreate it from memory.
 
What do you think about this proposal?
 
$ printf '%x' $(date -u -d '1979-01-01 12:34:56' +%s) $(date ...) 4
or 8 times.
 
One has to remember only the dates (times are optional) and then
simply run the one liner.

While it is likely one might remember four or eight random dates more
easily than a 16 or 32 character hex key, there's still the problem of
remembering 4 or 8 random dates.  Most folks remember "dates" because
something of importance happened on said date, and not just "a date",
so this might make the effort easier, but it is still possible to
'forget' one of the four, or eight, dates.

Given that the "dates" chunk the long string into "blocks", it might be
reasonable to use an erasure coding algorithm on the "blocks", and append
one or more blocks (i.e., dates) that are the erasure codes.  Then
forgetting (or misremembering) one or two of the dates might still
allow for recovery of the original key (or at least allow for detection
of a misremembering situation).