Hex to PGP Word List Converter

PGP fingerprints and SHA hashes are hex strings designed for machines. Humans misread them. One transposed nibble in a 40-character SHA-1 hash means you verified the wrong key. The PGP Word List maps each byte value (0x00 - 0xFF) to a phonetically distinct English word drawn from two separate 256-word dictionaries. Even-position bytes use one dictionary; odd-position bytes use the other. This alternation creates a natural rhythm that makes transposition errors immediately audible. The system was designed by Phil Zimmermann for PGP key verification over telephone calls.

This tool parses arbitrary hex input - raw strings, colon-separated fingerprints, or space-delimited hashes - strips formatting, and performs the byte-to-word lookup against the complete biometric word list. It assumes the first byte occupies position 0 (even). Limitation: input must contain an even number of hex characters after cleanup, since each word encodes exactly one byte (2 hex nibbles). Odd-length input is zero-padded on the left.

The conversion algorithm maps each byte of hex input to a word from one of two dictionaries based on its positional index.

Where i is the zero-based byte position, byte_i is the decimal value (0 - 255) of the i-th byte pair in the hex string, EvenDict is the 256-entry even-position word list, and OddDict is the 256-entry odd-position word list. The hex string is first sanitized by removing all non-hex characters, then if the resulting length is odd, a leading 0 is prepended to ensure complete byte pairs.