khekmatyar / sharedsecret

Mobile app frontend for age/minisign key exchange

Shared Secret

A Mobile app frontend for Age/Minisign key exchange

This project aims to create a mobile application to support the use of age and minisign for mobile devices and make key exchange easy for everyday usage.

Key Features:

• provide a frontend to use age and minisign on mobile plattforms (Android/IOS)
• exchange public (age/minisign) keys by displaying a QR code on mobile devices
• optionally exchange an additional shared secret (password) via QR code to provide post-quantum resistance
• manage stored public keys (Save public key data with a contacts name, email or phone number?)

To be determined

• Which frameworks to use for mobile app development
• Using age or rage as backend?
• Optional key exchange via NFC?

Motivation

Age and minisign were designed to provide a modern alternative to pgp with shorter, easier to handle public keys. However, key exchange is still one of the most significant challenges for secure file encryption and signing. Providing a mobile app to exchange public keys via QR code intents to make the use of these applications easier and more accessible.

Current Status

• initial application design

sharedsecret's Issues

Support Covert Encryption

You should also consider supporting our format. We use Age, SSH and other existing key formats and thus won't need key exchange (at least not unless we end up implementing X3DH or other protocols that allow forward secrecy by smarter key exchange, requiring another format). The encryption format is more secure than any of the ones currently in use and produces shorter ciphertext, but it is also still in early development.

We expect to release a stable version around March-June next year, which probably coincides with your app development schedule. Desktop GUI and a webapp are currently being worked on, but we plan to do no mobile apps of our own but rather leave that to third parties. A CLI version is already fairly complete.

See https://github.com/covert-encryption/covert for further information.