How do we store metadata in an elegant and comprehensible way and associate it with our work? How do we manage our keys and care for our privacy?
# Narrative
In *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, just moments before the Earth's imminent destruction, the planet’s second most intelligent species — the Dolphins — make their dramatic and mysterious exit. As they vanish from our Atmosphere, they leave behind one final, cryptic message to humanity: > “So long, and thanks for all the Fish!”
Our aim is to use the literal image of a fish, as not simply a symbol of the underlying technology, but an actual digital key that can be used to secure your data and identity online. Managing your keys becomes the a task of managing these files which you can visualise, understand and care for in familiar ways.
# Stenography To achieve this, we aim to associate metadata with images — such as those of fish or Federated Wiki flags. More precisely, we intend to embed the metadata directly into the images themselves, so that possessing the image file is equivalent to possessing the key.
We also want to explore the relationship between the visual appearance of the key and its cryptographic meaning. By doing so, we hope to make the use and management of these keys more intuitive and accessible.
# Practice
Embedding metadata in a standard way in images that can be distributed easily on the web and in messaging systems is not straight forwards. Metadata is often stripped out, and libraries and standards across platforms and image formats are complex and unreliable.
More than narrative we aim to put modern public key based cryptography (pki) and identity in the hands of all Hitchhiker's. In this story we have: - Private Fish - Public Fish - Secret Fish