mnemonikey VS passphrase2pgp

Today I finally tagged the v1.0.0 stable release of Mnemonikey: A PGP key backup and recovery command-line tool and Golang library.

The epoch has been bumped to New Year 2023.

The seed and creation time is hashed with Argon2id before deriving keys, to reduce the feasibility of a batched brute force attack.

I have published my first ever tagged release of Mnemonikey, a novel CLI tool and Go library which allows PGP users to derive their PGP keys deterministically from a seed which is exported as a phrase of 14 words for easy offline backup. This works much in the same way keys for Bitcoin wallets can be deterministically derived from a recovery phrase.

I have a system I am designing for which I want slightly denser encoding, and thus I need a larger wordlist. Full context here. I would prefer not to create yet another competing standard.

As far as I'm aware, Mnemonikey is the first of its kind, rhyming only with the related but conceptually different passphrase2pgp tool, from which I drew my original inspiration.

I think people should seriously consider using something like passphrase2pgp [0] in addition to a hardware key like this. That way you can have a brain key (hopefully generated with diceware or equivalent) to tie together day-to-day keys like this to a more permanent identity. I'm honestly surprised that strategy is not more widespread.

[0] https://github.com/skeeto/passphrase2pgp

Check out Chris Wellons' tool passphrase2pgp - it does exactly what you're describing by hashing an arbitrary input passphrase with Argon2.

So the easiest way to synchronize gpg keys I found is https://github.com/skeeto/passphrase2pgp - it generates a deterministic gpg key (also ssh keys, x509 certificates...) from a passphrase. Excellent tool

One way to circumvent this is to use a strong passphrase to deterministically generate the PGP/SSH key [1] to unlock other passwords. The SSH key could grant access to a remote server with backups and the PGP key could decrypt passwords using pass [2].

1. https://github.com/skeeto/passphrase2pgp

2. https://www.passwordstore.org/

I know there are tools that can generate GPG from arbitrary inputs, but what I'm really looking for is something with direct compatibility with BIP 39 or (BIP 44) phrases in particular.

What if https://github.com/skeeto/passphrase2pgp is not obviously the software to use, or doesn't exist at some later point?

My own tool, passphrase2pgp works this way. It generates both OpenPGP and SSH Ed25519 keys from a user-chosen passphrase, and it's designed to send the key straight into the ssh-agent on demand.

Derive my keypair entirely from a passphrase, with generous key stretching. I never need to worry about backing up my keys. I later extended this idea to OpenPGP and SSH, where I also exclusively use passphrase-derived keys: passphrase2pgp.

passphrase2pgp: for storing my PGP and SSH keys in my brain. Neither ever reside in permanent storage.