history-fp

🐾 Create a behavioral fingerprint based on your zsh command line history

Description

history-fp project allows you to create a unique fingerprint based on your zsh history file. This fingerprint can be safely shared with anyone to compare your usage behavior and discover similarities.

No 3rd party services or APIs are involved, everything is calculated locally.

What is the point?

I thought that it would be funny enough to be able to compare my daily command line usage behavior with anyone just by sharing one string and this repo.

You can think of it as a behavioral matching system that answers the questions "What is my compatibility/likeness/similarity % with someone?" or "How similar are we?"

No serious application here, but you can use the same approach and techniques in other fields.

Quick Example

You can use the following example fingerprint to compare it with your usage behavior, the payload is:

bmFtZUBleGFtcGxlOjB4NDgwOTUxNDNkOTNlZWMxMDo2NDozOjM6MTAwOjE6MToxMA==

Which decodes to:

name@example:0x48095143d93eec10:64:3:3:100:1:1:10

Where the representation format is:

<contact info>:hex(<fingerprint>):<hash bits>:<shingle size>:<command complexity>:<max commands>:<included flags>:<case insensitive>:<segment threshold>

Which was created as:

from fp import HistoryFingerprint, encode_fp

commands = ["ls", "docker ps", "kubectl", "python3", "git commit"] * 20  # example
fp = HistoryFingerprint(commands).calculate()
payload = encode_fp(fp, "name@example")
print(payload)

The following operation will calculate your fp and compare it with the example above:

make compare payload=bmFtZUBleGFtcGxlOjB4NDgwOTUxNDNkOTNlZWMxMDo2NDozOjM6MTAwOjE6MToxMA==

In my case, the example has almost 47% similarity comparing with my behavior:

match with 'name@example': 46.875% similarity (different)

For you, it can be totally different.

Same way, you can share your fingerprint with someone else to compare. Please, refer to the Usage section for more details or use --help on module.

Requirements

No specific requirements or 3rd party dependencies are required, everything is included.

Python 3
python-hashes package (required modules are already included in the project, official repository)

Tests

Tested only on macOS, only with zsh.

To make sure that everything works as expected, run smoke tests:

make tests

Usage

Create a fingerprint

Create a personal fingerprint based on your zsh history file:

make create contact=<nickname, username, e-mail, etc.>

Or:

python3 fp.py create --history ~/.zsh_history --contact <nickname, username, e-mail, etc.>

Expected result:

payload with fingerprint: <payload>

This payload can be safely shared with anyone to compare.

Compare a shared fingerprint

Compare someone's fingerprint (as a payload) with your personal fingerprint:

make compare payload=<payload>

Or:

python3 fp.py compare --history ~/.zsh_history --payload <payload>