The use case which brought this tool into existence, is that of creating backups of GPG private keys or any other cryptographic key or data of similar value for that matters. Inspired by paperkey, the idea is to transform the data into printable form in such a way that easy recovery into its digital original is possible. Other than paperkey, this tool allow to split the data into fragments, which on its own are worthless and only if brought together, can recreate the secret they were created from.
curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/corvus-ch/tools/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
apt install bilocation
curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/corvus-ch/tools/script.rpm.sh | sudo bash
yum install bilocation
brew install corvus-ch/tools/horcrux
If you are not familiar with Homebrew visit https://brew.sh.
Backup a GPG key:
KEY_ID=… # Declare variable holding the ID of the GPG key you want to backup.
gpg --export "${KEY_ID}" > public.gpg
gpg --export-secret-key "${KEY_ID}" > "${KEY_ID}.gpg"
paperkey --secret-key="${KEY_ID}.gpg" --output-type raw --output="${KEY_ID}.bin"
horcrux create "${KEY_ID}.bin"
ls *.txt.* # Those are the files you can now place at your backup locations.
Restore a GPG key (builds on top of the above example):
horcrux restore -o paperkey.bin *.txt.* # For this example only two of the three files are required.
paperkey --pubring=public.gpg --secrets=paperkey.bin --input-type=raw --output=secret.gpg
diff "${KEY_ID}.gpg" secret.gpg
The QR code format provide a limited feature set and can not be used to recover
the data. A tool like zbarimg from the zbar libary can be used to
scan the qr codes so it can be read by the zbase32 format.
- Basic application
- Plain text format for print and easy scan/ocr
- QR Code format for easier scanning
- Template system for custom output
This library is licenced under MIT. For information about how to contribute to this project, see CONTRIBUTING.md.