Sunday, May 28, 2017

Keybase looks like it will not support UTF-8 well.

When I first came across keybase.io, I was excited about the premise of simple key management. I'm a crypto novice, but still, I've seen some terrible crypto implementations.

So what's the problem with keybase? Well, nothing as long as you only speak English. For some reason, it seems that keybase will not let you name devices with utf-8 characters.

I do not believe that the keybase team realized what an annoying bummer that is. I name each of my devices in the language of which I primarily use it. The analogy is that English speakers laugh when you transliterate "Dragon King" into "Long Wang". As young as keybase is as a company and application, I wish they would invest in language support on the front end. Currently, if you want to name a device in Japanese, or French/Spanish with the complete character set, you are out of luck. The proof is in the regex:

var deviceRE = regexp.MustCompile(`^[a-zA-Z0-9][ _'a-zA-Z0-9+-]*$`)
var badDeviceRE = regexp.MustCompile(`  |[ '+_-]$|['+_-][ ]?['+_-]`)

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