Has anyone else been playing Wordle? It's like the old game "Mastermind" but with 5 letter words. You have 6 tries to guess the word. For each word guess, you get a black square for a wrong letter, a yellow square for a correct letter misplaced, and a green square for a correctly placed letter.
I think part of its popularity right now is that it's once a day, everyone gets the same word, and then you get a really simple way to show your results:
Wordle 210 3/6*
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
It's the day number, the guesses out of 6, and the a series of boxes in unicode, up to 6 lines.
Phil Plait started a joke thread where he simply pasted 1 row of 5 green boxes as his Wordle score. Clearly, we need a defense against that. I spent the afternoon making a too complicated way to verify that you at least know the word of the day.
At its heart, it's just signs a text with a key phrase.
Dave$ target/debug/wordle-hash -k "faker" text 'Wordle 210 3/6*
>
> ⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
> 🟩🟩🟨🟨⬛
> 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩'
Wordle 210 3/6*
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
sha256:pNyGjwj76Lma0e2Fi9wM8KdGc9YUar4GAZQQXDKDMt0 =
And then you can copy the "signed" text, and if you know the word, you can verify they signed it with the right word.
Dave$ target/debug/wordle-hash -k "faker" verify 'Wordle 210 3/6*
>
> ⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
> 🟩🟩🟨🟨⬛
> 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
> sha256:pNyGjwj76Lma0e2Fi9wM8KdGc9YUar4GAZQQXDKDMt0 =
> '
Wordle 210 3/6*
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Verified!
This doesn't actually solve the issue of someone faking the wordle output and signing it with the answer that they learned, but it's something.
In the meantime, since I spent several hours on this, I posted it to GitHub:
GitHub - davebob3/simple-text-singer: Inspired by the simple output from Wordle, I wanted a way to sign the text to prove I knew the answer of the day.