Founder IDs need to be re-registered with Keyhotee 0.7.0We recently discovered a problem with the way we're generating public keys in Keyhotee, and the best solution we could come up will require re-registering your Keyhotee Founder IDs. However, we've worked hard to make this process simpler than in the past, so it shouldn't be too bad I think. Below is a full description of the problem and our solution. Since we had to make this breaking change, we've also incorporated several other “breaking changes” that will require use of Keyhotee 0.7.0 versus the older alpha clients.
The Problem: city_hash64 is not stable across versions and is not well standardizedThe algorithm Keyhotee uses to automatically generate the public key for a Keyhotee ID employs a hashing function called city_hash. While recently investigating the city_hash algorithm, we found that it's not a unchanging algorithm that will generate the same hash value over different versions of the function. This is in contrast to the standard cryptographic hashes like sha2 which are guaranteed to produce the same hash number for a given input across all implementations of sha2.
This guarantee provided by the standard cryptographic hash functions is important for Keyhotee IDs, because it is desirable for a user to be able to re-generate the same public keys for a profile when using many different Keyhotee-style clients. For example, a user might use the existing C++-based Keyhotee client on his desktop and a Java-based Keyhotee client (not yet developed) on an Android phone, and he would want to be able to use the same Keyhotee IDs on either system.
The Solution: Replace city_hash with sha2To eliminate this problem so that the public keys are easy to regenerate on different Keyhotee-client implementations, we are replacing all uses of city_hash in the generation of Keyhotee clients with sha2 based hashes. The only problem with this solution is that it requires that all Keyhotee founder Ids to be registered again with the new public keys generated using sha2 hashing.
Steps to register your Founder ID(s)1) Download the appropriate OS version of Keyhotee 0.7.0 here:
ftp://178.63.85.22/Keyhotee/Windows/2014-04-21_00-00-43/Keyhotee-0.7.92-win32.exeftp://178.63.85.22/Keyhotee/Linux/2014-04-21_15-48-02/Keyhotee.tar.gzftp://178.63.85.22/Keyhotee/MacOS/2014-04-05_00-01-42/Keyhotee.dmg2) Create a NEW profile (existing profiles are invalid). Record in a safe location the information you enter to create your profile (first/middle/last name, your brainwallet passcode, and your profile password).
3) From the main Keyhotee GUI menu, select the menu option “New Identity”. In the New Identity dialog, enter your Keyhotee Founder ID and your Keyhotee Founder Code. If you've entered the information correctly, you should see some “points” appear at the bottom of the dialog. The points message indicates that you have successfully registered your Keyhotee ID with our server. If you no longer have your Founder ID or Founder Code, you can contact Stan for this information.