7 ms·

GPG keys are not that long, maybe 2 pages (ascii armored). Just print the private key out and store that in a safe or deposit box. You can physically see the ke

GPG keys are not that long, maybe 2 pages (ascii armored). Just print the private key out and store that in a safe or deposit box. You can physically see the key, so you know the backup worked. If you ever need to restore it, yes it will take ~45 minutes to hand type the key back into a new computer. Oh well, that's the tax you pay for restoring your backup or making a new subkey. Civilization has long figured out how to store paper. I've grown to respect how powerful a printer and some patience can be for key backups. EDIT: I think most of the replies are missing the point. I want to keep things barebones. The only thing that should be required to recover is a copy of GPG. No qr decoder, script, or other nonsense. If you depend on something else for recovery, you are putting your trust in that. I trust GPG, paper, and my eyeballs. Also: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/

saganus 9y ago
I've been working, on and off, on a little side project to solve this exact issue. It's just a python script that converts a piece of text of arbitrary length, into a series of QR codes. I then plan to work on the "decoder" side, which takes a series of QR codes and outputs the original text. Basically just a concat of the QRs. The idea is that I'll print my private keys in both text and QRs so that I can easily recover the digital form if needed (and if that doesn't work, then I'll type it... Ugh). Hopefully I'll be able to finish it and do a Show HN sometime this year.. (or maybe the next).
- philsnow 9y ago
  Have a look at https://github.com/yishilin14/asc-key-to-qr-code-gif https://github.com/yishilin14/asc-key-to-qr-code-gif (linked from https://github.com/mssun/passforios/wiki#importing-ascii-armor-encrypted-key https://github.com/mssun/passforios/wiki#importing-ascii-arm... ), it does roughly what you're talking about doing.
  - saganus 9y ago
    That looks indeed very similar. We just need the decoder then! :) So I'm guessing there's definitely some need for a tool like this, right? I mean, being able to "QR-codify" any text and later getting it back could simplify some of these offline-storage actions, right?
- matheusd 9y ago
  I made one of this some time ago (encoder and decoder). HTTPS://github.com/matheusd/pypaperbak
Karunamon 9y ago
I wonder how hard it would be to run a couple pages of dense print (though in a monospaced and consistent format) through an OCR system. I might play with Tesseract[1] this weekend and see if this is even a feasible idea. If so, it makes the paper key storage a lot more palatable. [1]:https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
- philsnow 9y ago
  there are fonts that were designed specifically to be easily OCRed with high reliability. look for "OCR A".
- avian 9y ago
  On several separate occasions I tried to use Tesseract to OCR base64 and similar text that was printed in a normal monospace font (i.e. not a special OCR font) and scanned. I never got even close to getting useful results. I tried limiting the alphabet, disabling language models as far as I could and at most I could get a few recognizable character sequences right out of the whole page. I got the impression that the whole thing very much depends on being able to split text into English words and have easily separated paragraphs.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    Well, crap. Looks like QR codes are the better idea, then. Thanks for saving me a boatload of time!
mseebach 9y ago
When you print it, you can add a column for each line with a few characters of the hash of that line for quicker location of typos when typing it in (provided that you write a script that does the check).
adrianN 9y ago
You could use Optar http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/ http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

saganus 9y ago

I've been working, on and off, on a little side project to solve this exact issue. It's just a python script that converts a piece of text of arbitrary length, into a series of QR codes. I then plan to work on the "decoder" side, which takes a series of QR codes and outputs the original text. Basically just a concat of the QRs. The idea is that I'll print my private keys in both text and QRs so that I can easily recover the digital form if needed (and if that doesn't work, then I'll type it... Ugh). Hopefully I'll be able to finish it and do a Show HN sometime this year.. (or maybe the next).

philsnow 9y ago
Have a look at https://github.com/yishilin14/asc-key-to-qr-code-gif https://github.com/yishilin14/asc-key-to-qr-code-gif (linked from https://github.com/mssun/passforios/wiki#importing-ascii-armor-encrypted-key https://github.com/mssun/passforios/wiki#importing-ascii-arm... ), it does roughly what you're talking about doing.
- saganus 9y ago
  That looks indeed very similar. We just need the decoder then! :) So I'm guessing there's definitely some need for a tool like this, right? I mean, being able to "QR-codify" any text and later getting it back could simplify some of these offline-storage actions, right?
matheusd 9y ago
I made one of this some time ago (encoder and decoder). HTTPS://github.com/matheusd/pypaperbak

Karunamon 9y ago

I wonder how hard it would be to run a couple pages of dense print (though in a monospaced and consistent format) through an OCR system. I might play with Tesseract[1] this weekend and see if this is even a feasible idea. If so, it makes the paper key storage a lot more palatable. [1]:https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

philsnow 9y ago
there are fonts that were designed specifically to be easily OCRed with high reliability. look for "OCR A".
avian 9y ago
On several separate occasions I tried to use Tesseract to OCR base64 and similar text that was printed in a normal monospace font (i.e. not a special OCR font) and scanned. I never got even close to getting useful results. I tried limiting the alphabet, disabling language models as far as I could and at most I could get a few recognizable character sequences right out of the whole page. I got the impression that the whole thing very much depends on being able to split text into English words and have easily separated paragraphs.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Well, crap. Looks like QR codes are the better idea, then. Thanks for saving me a boatload of time!

mseebach 9y ago

When you print it, you can add a column for each line with a few characters of the hash of that line for quicker location of typos when typing it in (provided that you write a script that does the check).

adrianN 9y ago

You could use Optar http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/ http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/