Ideally, this would allow people to cryptographically sign comments and automatically verify comments that were signed by the same author, all without changing existing server software or adding ugly "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----" banners.
Ideally, this would allow people to cryptographically sign comments and automatically verify comments that were signed by the same author, all without changing existing server software or adding ugly "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----" banners.
One way would be to place N zws (zero-width spaces) between each original character, and treat each block as a digit which encodes a number. This could work for large original texts, but it would be clunky and very low bandwidth I think. E.g. if "." is zws, you could encode "fox" and the number 123 as "f.o..x...".
Better I think would be to create an alphabet with several of the zero-with characters and put the whole encoded number somewhere where it's unlikely to get trimmed or mess up line breaks (probably near the end in the interior but on a word boundary next to a space).
The hardest part would be making a transformation that wouldn't simplify it too much but would still be resilient enough to the transformations done by many forums like markdown/bbcode/trimming that the result could be perfectly converted into a PGP message. Maybe include some error correction?
Of course nobody ever said how we sign emails is beautiful.