But the complexity would probably make for a less secure system until everyone could just move on to the new standard). Perhaps with some kind of bridge, for easier transition (eg: nacl-gpg -verify file.asc, which gives similar output/return-codes to gpg, while file.asc can be signed by a 'nacl-key' trusted by a gpg key. For most everything else, I think a new standard would be a good thing. I'm not even sure if it really makes sense to keep backwards comparability with GPG - the main thing would probably be to be compatible with GPG agent and smartcards. I very much welcome someone hammering out a standard equivalent to GPG, but based on NaCL, that is: have a master key (off-line), have a private-sub-key (on-line, protected by smart card/pass phrase), enable further sub-keys - and a companion tool (set) for verifying up the chain (like gpg2 -verify file.asc, but with file.asc being backed by a (device) sub-key, signed by the private key, signed by the 'master' off-line key - and allow for revoking 'from this key and down' (eg: I lost my phone, revoke phone-key, my laptop got hacked, revoke my sub-key, and all device keys.)).īut I'm not sure if that is what keybase is trying to do? This is exactly 2fa: two devices sharing a secret? Normally your idp and your TOTP app/token share a secret, now two of your devices share a secret? > Technically, though, this is not a normal 2fa: the devices will share a secret with just each other. If you sign anything with a nacl sub-key, that can't be verified with gpg? It's not even clear if this will work off-line, when keybase is down, when keybase have revoked your account.?

But it's unclear to me how this is an improvement for users. I'm not even sure what this feature is supposed to do?Īs best I can gather, this ties signing to keybase.io (which is anchored in a GPG-key). * NaCL is the new hotness, PGP is old and busted * NaCL is a small library and therefore is probably easier to incorporate into a variety of clients rather than the behemoth that is GPG/libgcrypt. * ECC is generally considered more future-proof than RSA That was probably the most important motivation for Keybase to use them. Imagine how bad it would be if you had to encode 4096 bits instead of just 256! They are probably generating this (Diceware-esque) string by splitting the 256-bit key into n-bit segments, using each n-bit segment as an index into an array of words, and then joining the words to form a 'sentence' that encodes the value of the key.ġ4 words is already pretty unwieldy, as they acknowledge in the blog post. 'death punch correct staple battery horse clearly cherry picked words yeah moo car lisp'

The 'Paper keys' section of the blog post discusses this at length, and shows an example of a Paper Key: While their ideal workflow is to communicate keys by scanning QR codes, they currently need an alternative workflow to communicate keys between desktops (and will always need an alternative for users who can't scan QR codes for whatever reason). Critically, they are much smaller and therefore easier to communicate between people/devices. The most important benefit is probably that NaCL keys are 256-bit keys based on ECC (specifically, Curve25519), which means these keys are stronger, faster, and actually more secure than the strongest keys commonly used in PGP (4096-bit RSA keys). I didn't design this so I can't say for certain, but from reading their post there are a couple of benefits that NaCL confers over PGP for generating per-device keys.

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