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Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

fluidkeys.com

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Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#31
The tool for this that everyone I know uses is Magic Wormhole. Wormhole has a more straightforward security model and is more thoughtfully designed: it uses a PAKE and relies on out-of-band secret sharing, rather than attempting a registry of "verified" public keys.

You should probably just use Wormhole.

    pip install magic-wormhole

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Magic Wormhole for all my peer-to-peer file transfers and love it.

Who runs the rendezvous server for MW?

Look here:

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html...

tl,dr:

- Rendezvous server is a public one - You can run your own - Code is in the `wormhole` library.

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Magic Wormhole for all my peer-to-peer file transfers and love it.

Who runs the rendezvous server for MW?

> The wormhole library requires a “Rendezvous Server”: a simple WebSocket-based relay that delivers messages from one client to another. This allows the wormhole codes to omit IP addresses and port numbers. The URL of a public server is baked into the library for use as a default, and will be freely available until volume or abuse makes it infeasible to support. Applications which desire more reliability can easily run their own relay and configure their clients to use it instead. Code for the Rendezvous Server is included in the library. (o)

notably, you can run your own

(o) https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html...

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#34
post #3

How does this compare to keybase?

I'm a user but no expert about keybase. As far as I can tell they've pivoted to taking on Slack & friends with zero-knowledge team-chat, but global. Good luck to them! We're not in a hurry to try and move people off Slack or GnuPG: teams have their existing services (Slack, G-suite) and other workflows like Thunderbird + Enigmail, git signing etc. We think complementing those existing flows is the way to go. The long…

> As far as I can tell they've pivoted to taking on Slack & friends with zero-knowledge team-chat, but global.

What? I'm pretty curious what gave you this impression, as I've always seen their chat app as an interesting use built on top of their encrypted file system work, but in no way their primary use-case or business.

We (and everyone else I know that uses Keybase) use it for passing around sensitive information, either through chat, their encrypted Git repos, encrypted messages plopped into emails, etc.

I think Fluidkeys is cool and all, but I definitely wouldn't switch off of Keybase for it, and I think you're doing yourself a disservice by pretending that Keybase is "just another chat app" now and not a direct competitor that also has secure communication built in.

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#36
post #31

The tool for this that everyone I know uses is Magic Wormhole. Wormhole has a more straightforward security model and is more thoughtfully designed: it uses a PAKE and relies on out-of-band secret sharing, rather than attempting a registry of "verified" public keys. You should probably just use Wormhole. pip install magic-wormhole

Isn't there only 65K passwords/magic keywords in wormhole ? What if someone constantly bruteforce all of these combinations, wouldn't he get access to the files that you are sending ?

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#37
post #36
post #31

The tool for this that everyone I know uses is Magic Wormhole. Wormhole has a more straightforward security model and is more thoughtfully designed: it uses a PAKE and relies on out-of-band secret sharing, rather than attempting a registry of "verified" public keys. You should probably just use Wormhole. pip install magic-wormhole

Isn't there only 65K passwords/magic keywords in wormhole ? What if someone constantly bruteforce all of these combinations, wouldn't he get access to the files that you are sending ?

This is covered in their docs, along with mitigation.

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/attacks.html

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Magic Wormhole for all my peer-to-peer file transfers and love it.

Who runs the rendezvous server for MW?

(author of magic-wormhole here)

I do. You can use your own, but then both sides have to type in the same --relay-url=URL value (instead of using the one that's baked into the app).

magic-wormhole is both a file-transfer tool and a library for provisioning/transferring secrets via a code. If you were embedding the library in your own app, you might want to bake in a different relay server (which you run) to avoid depending upon me for your uptime.

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#39
post #36
post #31

The tool for this that everyone I know uses is Magic Wormhole. Wormhole has a more straightforward security model and is more thoughtfully designed: it uses a PAKE and relies on out-of-band secret sharing, rather than attempting a registry of "verified" public keys. You should probably just use Wormhole. pip install magic-wormhole

Isn't there only 65K passwords/magic keywords in wormhole ? What if someone constantly bruteforce all of these combinations, wouldn't he get access to the files that you are sending ?

The short answer is that PAKE is single-use, so the attacker only gets one guess (and their attempt prevents the legitimate peer from trying either). Each time they consume someone else's transfer attempt, they get a 1-in-65k chance of succeeding, and a 65535-in-65536 chance of alerting the peer that they failed.

For the attacker to have a 50/50 chance of successfully stealing your file transfer, you'd have to (on average) re-run the `wormhole send` program over 30000 times. I don't know about you, but I'm not that patient, and I'd give up long before they had a significant chance of success :).

Re: Show HN: Send encrypted secrets from the command line

#40
post #31

The tool for this that everyone I know uses is Magic Wormhole. Wormhole has a more straightforward security model and is more thoughtfully designed: it uses a PAKE and relies on out-of-band secret sharing, rather than attempting a registry of "verified" public keys. You should probably just use Wormhole. pip install magic-wormhole

BTW it's been in debian+ubuntu for a couple of years, so `apt install magic-wormhole` works too.
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