Identity · signing
Let this browser sign for you
Turns you press are recorded under your name. With a signing key they are recorded under your name and carry a signature we could not have written ourselves.
What changes, exactly
Today a turn you press here is attributed: this page hands us the name you are signed in as and we take it at face value. That is not a flaw in how you played — it is the ordinary way a browser plays, and every board counts those turns. What it cannot do is prove that the person pressing the button was you.
A signing key changes that. Your browser makes one, here, in this tab. The half that signs never leaves it: not to us, not into this page, not into anything you could paste somewhere. From then on each turn you press is signed on this machine and we check the signature before the move lands, so the record says signed instead of attributed.
No identity on this browser yet
You can still enrol from here — the form reads your 24 words, not this browser's cookie. If you have not claimed an identity at all, start there: a signing key signs as somebody, so there has to be somebody first.
Enrol this browser
Your 24 words sign a short statement that this browser's key is allowed to play as you. That is the only thing they are used for here, and the same thing happens to them as everywhere else on this site: they are turned into a key inside this one request, used once, and every byte wiped before the answer goes out.
What a signing key is and is not
- It is a device, not an identity.
- Your 24 words are still who you are. This key is a browser you have said may play as you. Enrol as many browsers as you like; remove any of them whenever you want. Losing this one costs you the ability to sign from this browser and nothing else.
- We cannot sign with it, and neither can your words.
- The key was made by this browser and stored in a form the browser will use but will not hand back — not to us, not to this page's own scripts. That is what makes a signature from it mean something we could not have produced. It also means there is no recovering it: a new browser makes a new key and you enrol that one.
- It says who moved, not that the move was legal.
- Whether a move was allowed is decided by the rules and re-checked when anyone replays your session; that has always been true and does not depend on any of this. A signature answers the other question, the one a name alone could never answer.
- Your words still pass through us, once.
- Enrolling needs a signature by the key your words derive, and that key exists only while the words are in hand. So this is the same trade restoring an identity already makes, paid once per browser instead of once per visit. Turning the words into a key inside your browser instead is a further step we have not taken.