Key2MyHeart is an installation by Luis Fernandez and Douwe Schmidt where you can use your heartbeat to generate a key to send and receive encrypted mail.
You can contact us by sending an email to info@key2myheart.nl
The Key to my Heart is an interactive ritual where a human can obtain a new and verifiable digital identity in the form of a cryptographic key. A cryptographic key is a number generated in such a way that it can uniquely identify a human. To generate this digital identity we will use something that is unique to you: the beating of your heart.
Good keys are generated from random numbers. Computers are very bad at that so they need external sources of entropy. The heartbeat is a great, and very personal, source of random numbers. So we will help poor little computer by feeding human randomness into it.
Digital identities are very tricky, as the saying goes, on the internet nobody knows you are a dog... or a bot. There's an estimated 3 million bots on twitter interacting with humans and each other. But unlike all these bots, humans have a heart, they don't. To avoid any future misunderstanding as to who is who, we will create a large library of human signatures that are verified as human.
The public part of each key will be uploaded to a keyserver together with a recording of the heart. The private part of the key is given to the human to take home. The human can use this key to send encrypted email and also prove he or she is indeed human in digital contact.
Goldfrapp - Human
They fall from your mouth
Propelled by your belly and your tongue
I shiver when you shake and I fold into jelly
I think, I loved you more than me
Are you human or a dud?
Are you human or d'you make it up?
My baby cherry slipped
Pass me through your fingertips
Throw me down like an old rag
I'm not standing, dont look back
Are you human or a dud?
Are you human or d'you make it up?
(continues...)
Two lovely assistants dressed in white coats will hold a doppler to your heart. The sound it registers, the unique beat that is the source of life and everything you do all day, is fed into a computer and broadcasted through speakers. The computer uses the beat of your heart to create your unique key. The speakers are just there for extra dramatic effect.
The key will be placed on a USB bracelet for maximum physical security and for you to take home. On the USB you will also find documentation and software to help you put the key to use. You will also receive a box of matches containing your revocation code as a QR code. You can use the revocation code to make your key invalid in case you loose it. You can use the matches to burn the code in case of an emergency.
A special magnifier attached to the screen allows the individual to confirm we delete any trace of the procedure and keys after he or she received the key to her heart.
This concludes the ritual of the creation of the Key to your Heart.
With the little ritual of making keys in a very personal setting we want to raise awareness about the difficulties of secure communication. Each step in the procedure is questionable and provocates questions on trust and and pushes boundaries of intimacy. We hope to engage with partakers in a dialogue on privacy online and the challenges it poses.
The slow growth of a library with human generated keys, each one of them verified to belong to a human also raises the issue of singularity and what meassures we need to take to prevent a robot takeover. The wristband and the matches help to make the abstract more tangible and can function as a discussion object at a later date.