pig-monkey.com - crypto

YubiKey Cleaning

2020-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve carried the same YubiKey NEO on my keychain for five years. On average it gets used dozens of times per day, via USB, as an OpenPGP card. The YubiKey looks a little worse for wear, but it almost always works flawlessly.

Occasionally, it requires a few insertions to be read. When this happens I clean the contacts by rubbing them gently with a Pentel Clic Eraser, wiping off the dust, spraying them with isopropyl alcohol, and then wiping them dry. Afterwards, the YubiKey is registered immediately on the first insert. I perform this procedure about once or twice per year.

Using the eraser is potentially dangerous, but I’ve had good luck with it over the years. The white vinyl in the Pentel Clic feels very smooth compared to the abrasiveness of the rubber found on the tops of most pencils.

Optical Backups of Financial Archives

2019-06-29T00:00:00-07:00

Every year I burn an optical archive of my financial documents, similar to how (and why) I create optical backups of photos. I schedule this financial archive for the spring, after the previous year’s taxes have been submitted and accepted. Taskwarrior solves the problem of remembering to complete the archive.

$ task add project:finance due:2019-04-30 recur:yearly wait:due-4weeks "burn optical financial archive with parity"

The archive includes two git-annex repositories.

The first is my ledger repository. Ledger is the double-entry accounting system I began using in 2012 to record the movement of every penny that crosses one of my bank accounts (small cash transactions, less than about $20, are usually-but-not-always except from being recorded). In addition to the plain-text ledger files, this repository also holds PDF or JPG images of receipts.

The second repository holds my tax information. Each tax year gets a ctmg container which contains any documents used to complete my tax returns, the returns themselves, and any notifications of those returns being accepted.

The yearly optical archive that I create holds the entirety of these two repositories – not just the information from the previous year – so really each disc only needs to have a shelf life of 12 months. Keeping the older discs around just provides redundancy for prior years.

Creating the Archive

The process of creating the archive is very similar to the process I outlined six years ago for the photo archives.

The two repositories, combined, are about 2GB (most of that is the directory of receipts from the ledger repository). I burn these to a 25GB BD-R disc, so file size is not a concern. I’ll tar them, but skip any compression, which would just add extra complexity for no gain.

$ mkdir ~/tmp/archive
$ cd ~/library
$ tar cvf ~/tmp/archive/ledger.tar ledger
$ tar cvf ~/tmp/archive/tax.tar tax

The ledger archive will get signed and encrypted with my PGP key. The contents of the tax repository are already encrypted, so I’ll skip encryption and just sign the archive. I like using detached signatures for this.

$ cd ~/tmp/archive
$ gpg -e -r peter@havenaut.net -o ledger.tar.gpg ledger.tar
$ gpg -bo ledger.tar.gpg.sig ledger.tar.gpg
$ gpg -bo tax.tar.sig tax.tar
$ rm ledger.tar

Previously, when creating optical photo archives, I used DVDisaster to create the disc image with parity. DVDisaster no longer exists. The code can still be found, and the program still works, but nobody is developing it and it doesn’t even an official web presence. This makes me uncomfortable for a tool that is part of my long-term archiving plans. As a result, I’ve moved back to using Parchive for parity. Parchive also does not have much in the way of active development around it, but it is still maintained, has been around for a long period of time, is still used by a wide community, and will probably continue to exist as long as people share files on less-than-perfectly-reliable mediums.

As previously mentioned, I’m not worried about the storage space for these files, so I tell par2create to create PAR2 files with 30% redundancy. I suppose I could go even higher, but 30% seems like a good number. By default this process will be allowed to use 16MB of memory, which is cute, but RAM is cheap and I usually have enough to spare so I’ll give it permission to use up to 8GB.

$ par2create -r30 -m8000 recovery.par2 *

Next I’ll use hashdeep to generate message digests for all the files in the archive.

$ hashdeep * > hashes

At this point all the file processing is completed. I’ll put a blank disc in my burner (a Pioneer BDR-XD05B) and burn the directory using growisofs.

$ growisofs -Z /dev/sr0 -V "Finances 2019" -r *

Verification

The final step is to verify the disc. I have a few options on this front. These are the same steps I’d take years down the road if I actually needed to recover data from the archive.

I can use the previous hashes to find any files that do not match, which is a quick way to identify bit rot.

$ hashdeep -x -k hashes *.{gpg,tar,sig,par2}

I can check the integrity of the PGP signatures.

$ gpg --verify tax.tar.gpg{.sig,}
$ gpg --verify tax.tar{.sig,}

I can use the PAR2 files to verify the original data files.

$ par2 verify recovery.par2

PGP Key Renewal

2018-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

Last year I demonstrated setting up the USB Armory for PGP key management. The two management operations I perform on the Armory are key signing and key renewal. I set my keys to expire each year, so that each year I need to confirm that I am not dead, still control the keys, and still consider them trustworthy.

After booting up the Armory, I first verify that NTP is disabled and set the current UTC date and time. Time is critical for any cryptography operations, and the Armory has no battery to maintain a clock.

$ timedatectl set-ntp false
$ timedatectl set-time "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss"

My keys are stored on an encrypted microSD card, which I mount and decrypt.

$ mkdir /mnt/sdcard
$ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda sdcrypt
$ mount /dev/mapper/sdcrypt /mnt/sdcard

Next I’ll export a few environment variables to make things less redundant later on.

$ export YEAR=$(date +%Y)
$ export PREVYEAR=$(($YEAR-1))
$ export GNUPGHOME="/mnt/sdcard/gpg/$YEAR-renewal/.gnupg"
$ export KEYID="0x70B220FF8D2ACF29"

I perform each renewal in a directory specific to the current year, but the GNUPGHOME directory I set for this year’s renewal doesn’t exist yet. Better create it.

$ mkdir -p $GNUPGHOME
$ chmod 700 $GNUPGHOME

I keep a copy of my gpg.conf on the microSD card. That needs to be copied in to the new directory, and I’ll need to tell GnuPG what pinentry program to use.

$ cp /mnt/sdcard/gpg/gpg.conf $GNUPGHOME
$ echo "pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses" > $GNUPGHOME/gpg-agent.conf

After renewing the master key and subkey the previous year, I exported them. I’ll now import those backups from the previous year.

$ gpg --import /mnt/sdcard/gpg/$PREVYEAR-renewal/backup/peter\@havenaut.net.master.gpg-key
$ gpg --import /mnt/sdcard/gpg/$PREVYEAR-renewal/backup/peter\@havenaut.net.subkeys.gpg-key

When performing the actual renewal, I’ll set the expiration to 13 months. This needs to be done for the master key, the signing subkey, the encryption subkey, and the authentication subkey.

$ gpg --edit-key $KEYID
trust
5
expire
13m
y
key 1
key 2
key 3
expire
y
13m
y
save

That’s the renewal. I’ll list the keys to make sure they look as expected.

$ gpg --list-keys

Before moving the subkeys to my Yubikey, I back everything up. This will be what I import the following year.

$ mkdir /mnt/sdcard/gpg/$YEAR-renewal/backup
$ gpg --armor --export-secret-keys $KEYID > /mnt/sdcard/gpg/$YEAR-renewal/backup/peter\@havenaut.net.master.gpg-key
$ gpg --armor --export-secret-subkeys $KEYID > /mnt/sdcard/gpg/$YEAR-renewal/backup/peter\@havenaut.net.subkeys.gpg-key

Now I can insert my Yubikey, struggle to remember the admin PIN I set on it, and move over the subkeys.

$ gpg --edit-key $KEYID
toggle
key 1 # signature
keytocard
1
key 1
key 2 # encryption
keytocard
2
key 2
key 3 # authentication
keytocard
3
save

When I list the secret keys, I expect them to all be stubs (showing as ssb>).

$ gpg --list-secret-keys

Of course, for this to be useful I need to export my renewed public key and copy it to some place where it can be brought to a networked machine for dissemination.

$ gpg --armor --export $KEYID > /mnt/sdcard/gpg/$YEAR-renewal/peter\@havenaut.net.public.gpg-key
$ mkdir /mnt/usb
$ mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
$ cp /mnt/sdcard/gpg/$YEAR-renewal/peter\@havenaut.net.public.gpg-key /mnt/usb/

That’s it. Clean up, shutdown, and lock the Armory up until next year.

$ umount /mnt/usb
$ umount /mnt/sdcard
$ cryptsetup luksClose sdcrypt
$ systemctl poweroff

LUKS Header Backup

2017-07-16T00:00:00-07:00

I’d neglected backup LUKS headers until Gwern’s data loss postmortem last year. After reading his post I dumped the headers of the drives I had accessible, but I never got around to performing the task on my less frequently accessed drives. Last month I had trouble mounting one of those drives. It turned out I was simply using the wrong passphrase, but the experience prompted me to make sure I had completed the header backup procedure for all drives.

I dump the header to memory using the procedure from the Arch wiki. This is probably unnecessary, but only takes a few extra steps. The header is stored in my password store, which is obsessively backed up.

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/tmp
$ sudo mount ramfs /mnt/tmp -t ramfs
$ sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup /dev/sdc --header-backup-file /mnt/tmp/dump
$ sudo chown pigmonkey:pigmonkey /mnt/tmp/dump
$ pass insert -m crypt/luksheader/themisto < /mnt/tmp/dump
$ sudo umount /mnt/tmp
$ sudo rmdir /mnt/tmp

Borg Assimilation

2017-07-05T00:00:00-07:00

For years the core of my backup strategy has been rsnapshot via cryptshot to various external drives for local backups, and Tarsnap for remote backups.

Tarsnap, however, can be slow. It tends to take somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes to create my dozen or so archives, even if little has changed since the last run. My impression is that this is simply due to the number of archives I have stored and the number of files I ask it to archive. Once it has decided what to do, the time spent transferring data is negligible. I run Tarsnap hourly. Twenty minutes out of every hour seems like a lot of time spent Tarsnapping.

I’ve eyed Borg for a while (and before that, Attic), but avoided using it due to the rapid development of its earlier days. While activity is nice, too many changes too close together do not create a reassuring image of a backup project. Borg seems to have stabilized now and has a large enough user base that I feel comfortable with it. About a month ago, I began using it to backup my laptop to rsync.net.

Initially I played with borgmatic to perform and maintain the backups. Unfortunately it seems to have issues with signal handling, which caused me to end up with annoying lock files left over from interrupted backups. Borg itself has good documentation and is easy to use, and I think it is useful to build familiarity with the program itself instead of only interacting with it through something else. So I did away with borgmatic and wrote a small bash script to handle my use case.

Creating the backups is simple enough. Borg disables compression by default, but after a little experimentation I found that LZ4 seemed to be a decent compromise between compression and performance.

Pruning backups is equally easy. I knew I wanted to match roughly what I had with Tarsnap: hourly backups for a day or so, daily backups for a week or so, then a month or two of weekly backups, and finally a year or so of monthly backups.

My only hesitation was in how to maintain the health of the backups. Borg provides the convenient borg check command, which is able to verify the consistency of both a repository and the archives themselves. Unsurprisingly, this is a slow process. I didn’t want to run it with my hourly backups. Daily, or perhaps even weekly, seemed more reasonable, but I did want to make sure that both checks were completed successfully with some frequency. Luckily this is just the problem that I wrote backitup to solve.

Because the consistency checks take a while and consume some resources, I thought it would also be a good idea to avoid performing them when I’m running on battery. Giving backitup the ability to detect if the machine is on battery or AC power was a simple hack. The script now features the -a switch to specify that the program should only be executed when on AC power.

My completed Borg wrapper is thus:

#!/bin/sh
export BORG_PASSPHRASE='supers3cr3t'
export BORG_REPO='borg-rsync:borg/nous'
export BORG_REMOTE_PATH='borg1'

# Create backups
echo "Creating backups..."
borg create --verbose --stats --compression=lz4             \
    --exclude ~/projects/foo/bar/baz                        \
    --exclude ~/projects/xyz/bigfatbinaries                 \
    ::'{hostname}-{user}-{utcnow:%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S}'        \
    ~/documents                                             \
    ~/projects                                              \
    ~/mail                                                  \
    # ...etc

# Prune backups
echo "Pruning backups..."
borg prune --verbose --list --prefix '{hostname}-{user}-'    \
    --keep-within=2d                                         \
    --keep-daily=14                                          \
    --keep-weekly=8                                          \
    --keep-monthly=12                                        \

# Check backups
echo "Checking repository..."
backitup -a                                             \
    -p 172800                                           \
    -l ~/.borg_check-repo.lastrun                       \
    -b "borg check --verbose --repository-only"         \
echo "Checking archives..."
backitup -a                                             \
    -p 259200                                           \
    -l ~/.borg_check-arch.lastrun                       \
    -b "borg check --verbose --archives-only --last 24" \

This is executed by a systemd service.

[Unit]
Description=Borg Backup

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/home/pigmonkey/bin/borgwrapper.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The service is called hourly by a systemd timer.

[Unit]
Description=Borg Backup Timer

[Timer]
Unit=borg.service
OnCalendar=hourly
Persistent=True

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

I don’t enable the timer directly, but add it to /usr/local/etc/trusted_units so that nmtrust activates it when I’m connected to trusted networks.

$ echo "borg.timer,user:pigmonkey" >> /usr/local/etc/trusted_units

I’ve been running this for about a month now and have been pleased with the results. It averages about 30 seconds to create the backups every hour, and another 30 seconds or so to prune the old ones. As with Tarsnap, deduplication is great.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                       Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
This archive:               19.87 GB             18.41 GB             10.21 MB
All archives:              836.02 GB            773.35 GB             19.32 GB
                       Unique chunks         Total chunks
Chunk index:                  371527             14704634
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The most recent repository consistency check took about 30 minutes, but only runs every 172800 seconds, or once every other day. The most recent archive consistency check took about 40 minutes, but only runs every 259200 seconds, or once per 3 days. I’m not sure that those schedules are the best option for the consistency checks. I may tweak their frequencies, but because I know they will only be executed when I am on a trusted network and AC power, I’m less concerned about the length of time.

With Borg running hourly, I’ve reduced Tarsnap to run only once per day. Time will tell if Borg will slow as the number of stored archives increase, but for now running Borg hourly and Tarsnap daily seems like a great setup. Tarsnap and Borg both target the same files (with a few exceptions). Tarsnap runs in the AWS us-east-1 region. I’ve always kept my rsync.net account in their Zurich datacenter. This provides the kind of redundancy that lets me rest easy.

Contrary to what you might expect given the number of blog posts on the subject, I actually spend close to no time worrying about data loss in my day to day life, thanks to stuff like this. An ounce of prevention, and all that. (Maybe a few kilograms of prevention in my case.)

The USB Armory for PGP Key Management

2017-06-28T00:00:00-07:00

I use a Yubikey Neo for day-to-day PGP operations. For managing the secret key itself, such as during renewal or key signing, I use a USB Armory with host adapter. In host mode, the Armory provides a trusted, open source platform that is compact and easily secured, making it ideal for key management.

Setting up the Armory is fairly straightforward. The Arch Linux ARM project provides prebuilt images. From my laptop, I follow their instructions to prepare the micro SD card, where /dev/sdX is the SD card.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=8
$ fdisk /dev/sdX
# `o` to clear any partitions
# `n`, `p`, `1`, `2048`, `enter` to create a new primary partition in the first position with a first sector of 2048 and the default last sector
# `w` to write
$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1
$ mkdir /mnt/sdcard
$ mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/sdcard

And then extract the image, doing whatever verification is necessary after downloading.

$ wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-usbarmory-latest.tar.gz
$ bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-usbarmory-latest.tar.gz -C /mnt/sdcard
$ sync

Followed by installing the bootloader.

$ sudo dd if=/mnt/sdcard/boot/u-boot.imx of=/dev/sdX bs=512 seek=2 conv=fsync
$ sync

The bootloader must be tweaked to enable host mode.

$ sed -i '/#setenv otg_host/s/^#//' /mnt/sdcard/boot/boot.txt
$ cd /mnt/sdcard/boot
$ ./mkscr

For display I use a Plugable USB 2.0 UGA-165 adapter. To setup DisplayLink one must configure the correct modules.

$ sed -i '/blacklist drm_kms_helper/s/^/#/g' /mnt/sdcard/etc/modprobe.d/no-drm.conf
$ echo "blacklist udlfb" >> /mnt/sdcard/etc/modprobe.d/no-drm.conf
$ echo udl > /mnt/sdcard/etc/modules-load.d/udl.conf

Finally, I copy over pass and ctmg so that I have them available on the Armory and unmount the SD card.

$ cp /usr/bin/pass /mnt/sdcard/bin/
$ cp /usr/bin/ctmg /mnt/sdcard/bin/
$ umount /mnt/sdcard

The SD card can then be inserted into the Armory. At no time during this process – or at any point in the future – is the Armory connected to a network. It is entirely air-gapped. As long as the image was not compromised and the Armory is stored securely, the platform should remain trusted.

Note that because the Armory is never on a network, and it has no internal battery, it does not keep time. Upon first boot, NTP should be disabled and the time and date set.

$ timedatectl set-ntp false
$ timedatectl set-time "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss" # UTC

On subsequent boots, the time and date should be set with timedatectl set-time before performing any cryptographic operations.

Cold Storage

2016-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

This past spring I mentioned my cold storage setup: a number of encrypted 2.5” drives in external enclosures, stored inside a Pelican 1200 case, secured with Abloy Protec2 321 locks. Offline, secure, and infrequently accessed storage is an important component of any strategy for resilient data. The ease with which this can be managed with git-annex only increases my infatuation with the software.

I’ve been happy with the Seagate ST2000LM003 drives for this application. Unfortunately the enclosures I first purchased did not work out so well. I had two die within a few weeks. They’ve been replaced with the SIG JU-SA0Q12-S1. These claim to be compatible with drives up to 8TB (someday I’ll be able to buy 8TB 2.5” drives) and support USB 3.1. They’re also a bit thinner than the previous enclosures, so I can easily fit five in my box. The Seagate drives offer about 1.7 terabytes of usable space, giving this setup a total capacity of 8.5 terabytes.

Setting up git-annex to support this type of cold storage is fairly straightforward, but does necessitate some familiarity with how the program works. Personally, I prefer to do all my setup manually. I’m happy to let the assistant watch my repositories and manage them after the setup, and I’ll occasionally fire up the web app to see what the assistant daemon is doing, but I like the control and understanding provided by a manual setup. The power and flexibility of git-annex is deceptive. Using it solely through the simplified interface of the web app greatly limits what can be accomplished with it.

Encryption

Before even getting into git-annex, the drive should be encrypted with LUKS/dm-crypt. The need for this could be avoided by using something like gcrypt, but LUKS/dm-crypt is an ingrained habit and part of my workflow for all external drives. Assuming the drive is /dev/sdc, pass cryptsetup some sane defaults:

$ sudo cryptsetup --cipher aes-xts-plain64 --key-size 512 --hash sha512 luksFormat /dev/sdc

With the drive encrypted, it can then be opened and formatted. I’ll give the drive a human-friendly label of themisto.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdc themisto_crypt
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 -L themisto /dev/mapper/themisto_crypt

At this point the drive is ready. I close it and then mount it with udiskie to make sure everything is working. How the drive is mounted doesn’t matter, but I like udiskie because it can integrate with my password manager to get the drive passphrase.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/themisto_crypt
$ udiskie-mount -r /dev/sdc

Git-Annex

With the encryption handled, the drive should now be mounted at /media/themisto. For the first few steps, we’ll basically follow the git-annex walkthrough. Let’s assume that we are setting up this drive to be a repository of the annex ~/video. The first step is to go to the drive, clone the repository, and initialize the annex. When initializing the annex I prepend the name of the remote with satellite :. My cold storage drives are all named after satellites, and doing this allows me to easily identify them when looking at a list of remotes.

$ cd /media/themisto
$ git clone ~/video
$ cd video
$ git annex init "satellite : themisto"

Disk Reserve

Whenever dealing with a repository that is bigger (or may become bigger) than the drive it is being stored on, it is important to set a disk reserve. This tells git-annex to always keep some free space around. I generally like to set this to 1 GB, which is way larger than it needs to be.

$ git config annex.diskreserve "1 gb"

Adding Remotes

I’ll then tell this new repository where the original repository is located. In this case I’ll refer to the original using the name of my computer, nous.

$ git remote add nous ~/video

If other remotes already exist, now is a good time to add them. These could be special remotes or normal ones. For this example, let’s say that we have already completed this whole process for another cold storage drive called sinope, and that we have an s3 remote creatively named s3.

$ git remote add sinope /media/sinope/video
$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="..."
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="..."
$ git annex enableremote s3

Trust

Trust is a critical component of how git-annex works. Any new annex will default to being semi-trusted, which means that when running operations within the annex on the main computer – say, dropping a file – git-annex will want to confirm that themisto has the files that it is supposed to have. In the case of themisto being a USB drive that is rarely connected, this is not very useful. I tell git-annex to trust my cold storage drives, which means that if git-annex has a record of a certain file being on the drive, it will be satisfied with that. This increases the risk for potential data-loss, but for this application I feel it is appropriate.

$ git annex trust .

Preferred Content

The final step that needs to be taken on the new repository is to tell it what files it should want. This is done using preferred content. The standard groups that git-annex ships with cover most of the bases. Of interest for this application is the archive group, which wants all content except that which has already found its way to another archive. This is the behaviour I want, but I will duplicate it into a custom group called satellite. This keeps my cold storage drives as standalone things that do not influence any other remotes where I may want to use the default archive.

$ git annex groupwanted satellite "(not copies=satellite:1) or approxlackingcopies=1"
$ git annex group . satellite
$ git annex wanted . groupwanted

For other repositories, I may want to store the data on multiple cold storage drives. In that case I would create a redundantsatellite group that wants all content which is not already present in two other members of the group.

$ git annex groupwanted redundantsatellite "(not copies=redundantsatellite:2) or approxlackingcopies=1"
$ git annex group . redundantsatellite
$ git annex wanted . groupwanted

Syncing

With everything setup, the new repository is ready to sync and to start to ingest content from the remotes it knows about!

$ git annex sync --content

However, the original repository also needs to know about the new remote.

$ cd ~/video
$ git remote add themisto /media/themisto/video
$ git annex sync

The same is the case for any other previously existing repository, such as sinope.

Cryptographic Identity

2016-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

Despite its shortcomings, I think PGP is still one of the better ways to verify a person’s identity. Because of this – and because I use my PGP key daily¹ – I make an effort to properly secure my private key. Verifying a PGP key is a fairly straightforward process for fellow PGP users, and my hope is that anyone who does verify my key can maintain a high confidence in its signature.

However, I also use other cryptographic channels to communicate – XMPP/OTR and Signal chief among them. I consider these keys more transient than PGP. The OTR keys on my computer are backed up because it takes no effort to do so, but I have no qualms about creating new ones if I feel like it. I don’t bother to port the same keys to other devices, like my phone. My Signal key is guaranteed to change anytime I rebuild or replace my phone. Given the nature of these keys and how I handle them, I don’t expect others to put the same amount of effort into verifying their fingerprints.

The solution to this is to maintain a simple text file, signed via PGP, containing the fingerprints of my other keys. With a copy of the file and a trusted copy of my public PGP key, anyone can verify my identity on other networks or communication channels. If a key is replaced, I simply add the new fingerprint to the file, sign it and distribute. Contacts download the file, check its signature, and thus easily trust the new fingerprint without additional rigmarole.

The first examples of this that I saw were from Yan and Tom Lowenthal. I thought it seemed like a great idea and began to maintain a file with a list of examples whenever I stumbled across then, with a note that I should do that someday².

Today I decided to stop procrastinating on this and create my own identity file. It is located at pig-monkey.com/id.txt. The file, along with the rest of this website, is in git so that changes to it may be tracked over time.

Inspired by some of the examples I had collected, I added a couple pieces of related information to the file. The section on PGP key signing should provide others some context for what it means when they see my signature on a different key. Even if no one cares, I found it useful to enunciate the policy simply to clear up my own thinking about what the different certification levels should mean. Finally, the section on key management gives others a rough idea about how I manage my key, which should help them to maintain their confidence in it. If I verify that someone’s identity and fingerprint match their key, I will have high confidence in its signature initially. But if I know that the person keeps their secret key on their daily driver machine without any additional effort to protect it, my confidence in it will degrade over time. Less so if I know that they take great care and handling in their key’s protection.

A file like this should also provide a good mechanism for creating a transition and revocation statement for my PGP key, should the need arise. One hopes that it does not.

Notes

↵ Realistically, I use PGP multiple times per hour when I'm on my computer.
↵ Since I began my list, Keybase has become a thing. It addresses a similar problem, although seems to promote using services like Twitter as the root of trust. Assuming that you want to stubbornly stick with a PGP key as the root of trust, I don't see the advantage of using Keybase for this problem, except that it offers a centralized lookup repository.

I celebrated World Backup Day by increasing the resiliency of data in my life.

2016-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

Four encrypted 2TB hard drives, stored in a Pelican 1200, with Abloy Protec2 PL 321 padlocks as tamper-evident seals. Having everything that matters stored in git-annex makes projects like this simple: just clone the repositories, define the preferred content expressions, and watch the magic happen.

My GPG key has been superseded.

2015-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve migrated to using a Yubikey Neo as a smart card and decided to replace the old key as part of the process. The new key can be found in the usual location or on your keyserver of choice.

Optical Backups of Photo Archives

2013-05-29T00:00:00-07:00

I store my photos in git-annex. A full copy of the annex exists on my laptop and on an external drive. Encrypted copies of all of my photos are stored on Amazon S3 (which I pay for) and box.com (which provides 50GB for free) via git-annex special remotes. The photos are backed-up to an external drive daily with the rest of my laptop hard drive via backitup.sh and cryptshot. My entire laptop hard drive is also mirrored monthly to an external drive stored off-site.

(The majority of my photos are also on Flickr, but I don’t consider that a backup or even reliable storage.)

All of this is what I consider to be the bare minimum for any redundant data storage. Photos have special value, above the value that I assign to most other data. This value only increases with age. As such they require an additional backup method, but due to the size of my collection I want to avoid backup methods that involve paying for more online storage, such as Tarsnap.

I choose optical discs as the medium for my photo backups. This has the advantage of being read-only, which makes it more difficult for accidental deletions or corruption to propagate through the backup system. DVD-Rs have a capacity of 4.7 GBs and a cost of around $0.25 per disc. Their life expectancy varies, but 10-years seem to be a reasonable low estimate.

Preparation

I keep all of my photos in year-based directories. At the beginning of every year, the previous year’s directory is burned to a DVD.

Certain years contain few enough photos that the entire year can fit on a single DVD. More recent years have enough photos of a high enough resolution that they require multiple DVDs.

Encrypt

Leaving unencrypted data around is bad form. The archive (or each of the files resulting from splitting the large archive) is next encrypted and signed with GnuPG.

$ gpg -eo 2012.tar.bz.gpg 2012.tar.bz
$ gpg -bo 2012.tar.bz.gpg.sig 2012.tar.bz.gpg

Imaging

The encrypted archive and the detached signature of the encrypted archive are what will be burned to the disc. (Or, in the case of a large archive, the encrypted splits of the full archive and the associated signatures will be burned to one disc per split/signature combonation.) Rather than burning them directly, an image is created first.

$ mkisofs -V "Photos: 2012 1/1" -r -o 2012.iso 2012.tar.bz.gpg 2012.tar.bz.gpg.sig

If the year has a split archive requiring multiple discs, I modify the sequence number in the volume label. For example, a year requiring 3 discs will have the label Photos: 2012 1/3.

Parity

When I began this project I knew that I wanted some sort of parity information for each disc so that I could potentially recover data from slightly damaged media. My initial idea was to use parchive via par2cmdline. Further research led me to dvdisaster which, despite being a GUI-only program, seemed more appropriate for this use case.

Both dvdisaster and parchive use the same Reed–Solomon error correction codes. Dvdidaster is aimed at optical media and has the ability to place the error correction data on the disc by augmenting the disc image, as well as storing the data separately. It can also scan media for errors and assist in judging when the media is in danger of becoming defective. This makes it an attractive option for long-term storage.

I use dvdisaster with the RS02 error correction method, which augments the image before burning. Depending on the size of the original image, this will result in the disc having anywhere from 20% to 200% redundancy.

Verify

After the image has been augmented, I mount it and verify the signature of the encrypted file on the disc against the local copy of the signature. I’ve never had the signatures not match, but performing this step makes me feel better.

$ sudo mount -o loop 2012.iso /mnt/disc
$ gpg --verify 2012.tar.bz.gpg.sig /mnt/disc/2012.tar.bz.gpg
$ sudo umount /mnt/disc

Burn

The final step is to burn the augmented image. I always burn discs at low speeds to diminish the chance of errors during the process.

$ cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=/dev/sr0 2012.iso

Similar to the optical backups of my password database, I burn two copies of each disc. One copy is stored off-site. This provides a reasonably level of assurance against any loss of my photos.

Password Management with Vim and GnuPG

2013-04-04T00:00:00-07:00

The first password manager I ever used was a simple text file encrypted with GnuPG. When I needed a password I would decrypt the file, read it in Vim, and copy the required entry to the system clipboard. This system didn’t last. At the time I wasn’t using GnuPG for much else, and this was in the very beginning of my Vim days, when the program seemed cumbersome and daunting. I shortly moved to other, purpose-built password managers.

After some experimentation I landed on KeePassX, which I used for a number of years. Some time ago I decided that I wanted to move to a command-line solution. KeePassX and a web browser were the only graphical applications that I was using with any regularity. I could see no need for a password manager to have a graphical interface, and the GUI’s dependency on a mouse decreased my productivity. After a cursory look at the available choices I landed right back where I started all those years ago: Vim and GnuPG.

These days Vim is my most used program outside of a web browser and I use GnuPG daily for handling the majority of my encryption needs. My greater familiarity with both of these tools is one of the reasons I’ve been successful with the system this time around. I believe the other reason is my more systematic approach.

Structure

The power of this system comes from its simplicity: passwords are stored in plain text files that have been encrypted with GnuPG. Every platform out there has some implementation of the PGP protocol, so the files can easily be decrypted anywhere. After they’ve been decrypted, there’s no fancy file formats to deal with. It’s all just text, which can be manipulated with a plethora of powerful tools. I favor reading the text in Vim, but any text editor will do the job.

All passwords are stored within a directory called ~/pw. Within this directory are multiple files. Each of these files can be thought of as a separate password database. I store bank information in financial.gpg. Login information for various shopping websites are in ecommerce.gpg. My email credentials are in email.gpg. All of these entries could very well be stored in a single file, but breaking it out into multiple files allows me some measure of access control.

Access

I regularly use two computers: my laptop at home and a desktop machine at work. I trust my laptop. It has my GnuPG key on it and it should have access to all password database files. I do not place complete trust in my machine at work. I don’t trust it enough to give it access to my GnuPG key, and as such I have a different GnuPG key on that machine that I use for encryption at work.

Having passwords segregated into multiple database files allows me to encrypt the different files to different keys. Every file is encrypted to my primary GnuPG key, but only some are encrypted with my work key. Login credentials needed for work are encrypted to the work key. I have no need to login to my bank accounts at work, and it wouldn’t be prudent to do so on a machine that I do not fully trust, so the financial.gpg file is not encrypted to my work key. If someone compromises my work computer, they still will be no closer to accessing my banking credentials.

Git

The ~/pw directory is a git repository. This gives me version control on all of my passwords. If I accidentally delete an entry I can always get it back. It also provides syncing and redundant storage without depending on a third-party like Dropbox.

Keys

An advantage of using a directory full of encrypted files as my password manager is that I’m not limited to only storing usernames and passwords. Any file can be added to the repository. I keep keys for backups, SSH keys, and SSL keys (all of which have been encrypted with my GnuPG key) in the directory. This gives me one location for all of my authentication credentials, which simplifies the locating and backing up of these important files.

Markup

Each file is structured with Vim folds and indentation. There are various ways for Vim to fold text. I use markers, sticking with the default {{{/}}} characters. A typical password entry will look like this:

Amazon{{{
    user:   foo@bar.com
    pass:   supers3cr3t
    url:    https://amazon.com
}}}

Each file is full of entries like this. Certain entries are grouped together within other folds for organization. Certain entries may have comments so that I have a record of the false personally identifiable information the service requested when I registered.

Super Ecommerce{{{
    user:   foobar
    pass:   g0d
    Comments{{{
        birthday:   1/1/1911
        first car:  delorean
    }}}
}}}

Following a consistent structure like this makes the file easier to navigate and allows for the possibility of the file being parsed by a script. The fold markers come into play with my Vim configuration.

Vim

I use Vim with the vim-gnupg plugin. This makes editing of encrypted files seamless. When opening existing files, the contents are decrypted. When opening new files, the plugin asks which recipients the file should be encrypted to. When a file is open, leaking the clear text is avoided by disabling viminfo, swapfile, and undofile. I run gpg-agent so that my passphrase is remembered for a short period of time after I use it. This makes it easy and secure to work with (and create) the encrypted files with Vim. I define a few extra options in my vimrc to facilitate working with passwords.

""""""""""""""""""""
" GnuPG Extensions "
""""""""""""""""""""

" Tell the GnuPG plugin to armor new files.
let g:GPGPreferArmor=1

" Tell the GnuPG plugin to sign new files.
let g:GPGPreferSign=1

augroup GnuPGExtra
" Set extra file options.
    autocmd BufReadCmd,FileReadCmd *.\(gpg\|asc\|pgp\) call SetGPGOptions()
" Automatically close unmodified files after inactivity.
    autocmd CursorHold *.\(gpg\|asc\|pgp\) quit
augroup END

function SetGPGOptions()
" Set updatetime to 1 minute.
    set updatetime=60000
" Fold at markers.
    set foldmethod=marker
" Automatically close all folds.
    set foldclose=all
" Only open folds with insert commands.
    set foldopen=insert
endfunction

The first two options simply tell vim-gnupg to always ASCII-armor and sign new files. These have nothing particular to do with password management, but are good practices for all encrypted files.

The first autocmd calls a function which holds the options that I wanted applied to my password files. I have these options apply to all encrypted files, although they’re intended primarily for use when Vim is acting as my password manager.

Folding

The primary shortcoming with using an encrypted text file as a password database is the lack of protection against shoulder-surfing. After the file has been decrypted and opened, anyone standing behind you can look over your shoulder and view all the entries. This is solved with folds and is what most of these extra options address.

I set foldmethod to marker so that Vim knows to look for all the {{{/}}} characters and use them to build the folds. Then I set foldclose to all. This closes all folds unless the cursor is in them. This way only one fold can be open at a time – or, to put it another way, only one password entry is ever visible at once.

The final fold option instructs Vim when it is allowed to open folds. Folds can always be opened manually, but by default Vim will also open them for many other cases: if you navigate to a fold, jump to a mark within a fold or search for a pattern within a fold, they will open. By setting foldopen to insert I instruct Vim that the only time it should automatically open a fold is if my cursor is in a fold and I change to insert mode. The effect of this is that when I open a file, all folds are closed by default. I can navigate through the file, search and jump through matches, all without opening any of the folds and inadvertently exposing the passwords on my screen. The fold will open if I change to insert mode within it, but it is difficult to do that by mistake.

I have my spacebar setup to toggle folds within Vim. After I have navigated to the desired entry, I can simply whack the spacebar to open it and copy the credential that I need to the system clipboard. At that point I can whack the spacebar again to close the fold, or I can quit Vim. Or I can simply wait.

Locking

The other special option I set is updatetime. Vim uses this option to determine when it should write swap files for crash recovery. Since vim-gnupg disables swap files for decrypted files, this has no effect. I use it for something else.

In the second autocmd I tell Vim to close itself on CursorHold. CursorHold is triggered whenever no key has been pressed for the time specified by updatetime. So the effect of this is that my password files are automatically closed after 1 minute of inactivity. This is similar to KeePassX’s behaviour of “locking the workspace” after a set period of inactivity.

Clipboard

To easily copy a credential to the system clipboard from Vim I have two shortcuts mapped.

" Yank WORD to system clipboard in normal mode
nmap <leader>y "+yE

" Yank selection to system clipboard in visual mode
vmap <leader>y "+y

Vim can access the system clipboard using both the * and + registers. I opt to use + because X treats it as a selection rather than a cut-buffer. As the Vim documentation explains:

Selections are “owned” by an application, and disappear when that application (e.g., Vim) exits, thus losing the data, whereas cut-buffers, are stored within the X-server itself and remain until written over or the X-server exits (e.g., upon logging out).

The result is that I can copy a username or password by placing the cursor on its first character and hitting <leader>y. I can paste the credential wherever it is needed. After I close Vim, or after Vim closes itself after 1 minute of inactivity, the credential is removed from the clipboard. This replicates KeePassX’s behaviour of clearing the clipboard so many seconds after a username or password has been copied.

Generation

Passwords should be long and unique. To satisfy this any password manager needs some sort of password generator. Vim provides this with its ability to call and read external commands I can tell Vim to call the standard-issue pwgen program to generate a secure 24-character password utilizing special characters and insert the output at the cursor, like this:

:r!pwgen -sy 24 1

Backups

The ~/pw directory is backed up in the same way as most other things on my hard drive: to Tarsnap via Tarsnapper, to an external drive via rsnapshot and cryptshot, rsync to a mirror drive. The issue with these standard backups is that they’re all encrypted and the keys to decrypt them are stored in the password manager. If I loose ~/pw I’ll have plenty of backups around, but none that I can actually access. I address this problem with regular backups to optical media.

At the beginning of every month I burn the password directory to two CDs. One copy is stored at home and the other at an off-site location. I began these optical media backups in December, so I currently have two sets consisting of five discs each. Any one of these discs will provide me with the keys I need to access a backup made with one of the more frequent methods.

Of course, all the files being burned to these discs are still encrypted with my GnuPG key. If I loose that key or passphrase I will have no way to decrypt any of these files. Protecting one’s GnuPG key is another problem entirely. I’ve taken steps that make me feel confident in my ability to always be able to recover a copy of my key, but none that I’m comfortable discussing publicly.

Shell

I’ve defined a shell function, pw(), that operates exactly like the function I use for notes on Unix.

# Set the password database directory.
PASSDIR=~/pw

# Create or edit password databases.
pw() {
    cd "$PASSDIR"
    if [ ! -z "$1" ]; then
        $EDITOR $(buildfile "$1")
        cd "$OLDPWD"
    fi
}

This allows me to easily open any password file from wherever I am in the filesystem without specifying the full path. These two commands are equivalent, but the one utilizing pw() requires fewer keystrokes:

$ vim ~/pw/financial.gpg
$ pw financial

The function changes to the password directory before opening the file so that while I’m in Vim I can drop down to a shell with :sh and already be in the proper directory to manipulate the files. After I close Vim the function returns me to the previous working directory.

This still required a few more keystrokes than I like, so I configured my shell to perform autocompletion in the directory. If financial.gpg is the only file in the directory beginning with an “f”, typing pw f<tab> is all that is required to open the file.

Simplicity

This setup provides simplicity, power, and portability. It uses the same tools that I already employ in my daily life, and does not require the use of the mouse or any graphical windows. I’ve been happily utilizing it for about 6 months now.

Initially I had thought I would supplement the setup with a script that would search the databases for a desired entry, using some combination of grep, awk and cut, and then copy it to my clipboard via xsel. As it turns out, I haven’t felt the desire to do this. Simply opening the file in Vim, searching for the desired entry, opening the fold and copying the credential to the system clipboard is quick enough. The whole process, absent of typing in my passphrase, takes me only a couple of seconds.

Resources

I’m certainly not the first to come up with the idea of managing password with Vim. These resources were particularly useful to me when I was researching the possibilities:

File encryption and password management by Conner McDaniel
Keep passwords in encrypted file on the Vim Wiki
Password Safe with Vim and OpenSSL by Noah

If you’re interesting in other ideas for password management, password-store and KeePassC are both neat projects that I follow.

2013 June 30: larsks has hacked together a Python script to convert KeepassX XML exports to the plain-text markup format that I use.

Gwern offers an excellent overview of Silk Road.

2013-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

In the essay he introduces the website and describes his experience as a user purchasing illegal drugs. It is well worth the read. I’ve spent hours on his website perusing his other works.

When mentioning the cypherpunks, I like to point to Moxie Marlinkspike's explanation of their failure.

2012-12-12T00:00:00-08:00

In his talk from Defcon 18 (transcript available), Moxie argues that what we were preparing for was fascism and what we got was social democracy. For me it was an eye-opening explanation, and one that I think is important to understand given the ever-increasing network effect of technologies that are a not only a danger to personal privacy but can also grow to threaten free thought.

Currently reading This Machine Kills Secrets by Andy Greenberg

2012-12-11T00:00:00-08:00

When the book was first published I assumed it would be just another entry into the media hubbub around WikiLeaks. When I saw that John Young – cranky old man of the cypherpunk movement – gave it a positive review I decided that it would be worth a read. While the book does center on Assange, Greenberg does an admirable job of tracing the history of the cypherpunks and describing what in the future we will probably refer to as a sequel to the cryptowars. It is a recommended read.

Bitcoins are not a value-store.

2012-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

When I first learned about the Bitcoin currency a few years ago, it didn’t excite me. A purely digital currency tied to no material good seemed an interesting project, but I didn’t see that it could have the practical value of, say, a digital gold currency. When the media blitz occurred last year I took another look and reached the same conclusion. A few months later I realized I was looking at the currency all wrong: bitcoins are not a value-store, they’re a means of exchange.

It doesn’t matter that Bitcoins are the digital equivalent of a fiat currency, with no inherent value. It doesn’t matter if their value fluctuates in relation to other currencies. There’s no reason to store wealth in Bitcoins (unless you’re a gambler). When you need to send money, purchase some Bitcoins and send them. When you need to receive money, accept Bitcoins and exchange them immediately for another currency. The value of the bitcoins only need to remain stable for the amount of time it takes to complete a transaction.