ritter.vg
Non-Persistent PGP Keys
3 Aug 2011 16:09:36 PST

I just got out of Dan Kaminsky's talk at Black Hat where he talked about a myriad of topics, but the one I want to focus on was his tool Phidelius. It's a library you reference with LD_PRELOAD that hooks /dev/random, /dev/urandom and some other functions that un-randomizes the random data that key generators like gnupg, openssl, or ssh-keygen uses.

Why would you want to do that? Well, instead of using a random stream of bytes - it uses a reproducible stream of bytes based off a password/passphrase. The bytes could come from any key derivation script, but both Dan and I chose scrypt, by Colin Percival.

His tool is considerably more robust than mine and works with many different programs without modification - mine specifically generates OpenPGP keys. And as he noted in his talk - while you can do this - that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

The idea has probably been public for some time now, although I couldn't find an example of - and since Dan has shouted it out, I figured now's the time to release my code and let people play with it while they're interested. Anyway, there are a ton of caveats, some of which I'll list:

The code is located here.

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