lokey

lokey is a tool that makes it easer to work with an convert between cryptographic key formats.

Named after the shape shifting and mischief-making Trickster from Norse mythology, this tool serves to test the bounds of possiblities and order.

Installing lokey

The fastest way to get lokey is to use pip:

$ pip install lokey

Using lokey

lokey makes it easy to fetch cryptograpic keys from public sources like Keybase and PGP keyservers, for example:

Fetch my Keybase key using my Twitter handle:

$ lokey fetch keybase twitter:jf

Search for PGP keys from journalists at the New York Times:

$ lokey fetch pgp nytimes.com

You can see all of the fetching commands that lokey has by typing:

$ lokey fetch

lokey is also a tool for converting between cryptographic key formats, for example

Make it easier to grant your friends access to your SSH server:

$ sudo adduser jf
$ mkdir ~jf/.ssh
$ lokey fetch keybase twitter:jf | lokey to ssh > ~jf/.ssh/authorized_keys

Send an S/MIME encrypted email to an administrator of a TLS secured webserver:

$ echo "A ship journeys from the east, Muspell's people are coming" > message.txt
$ lokey fetch tls example.com > example.com.pem
$ openssl smime -encrypt -des3 -in message.txt example.com.pem > smime.p7m

One of the administrators of the TLS secured webserver could read the message using this command:

openssl smime -decrypt -in smime.p7m -passin pass:[password for key] -inkey /path/to/webserver.key

lokey will also give you information about keys that you pipe into it:

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | lokey

At the moment, lokey can convert RSA keys between the following formats: openssh, X.509 Certificates, PGP, and JWT.

With lokey you can:

• Use the public SSL certicate of a website to send an S/MIME encrypted email to any website owner that uses TLS:
• Grant access to your a server by turning your friend's keybase key into an openssh key

Inspiration

Many things inspired this project. The genesis of this project comes from the many conversations I had with my dad about his implementation of OpenPGP in Common Lisp. One of those conversations was when I first learned that all RSA keys derived from the numbers ("e", "n", "d"). My dad's paper "Why RSA Works", gave me the grounding I needed to reason and understand RSA cryptography.

Other inspirations include Zed Shaw's vulnarb.com project, which was the first time I considered using TLS certificates for encrypting email. The Monkeysphere Project which inspired me to think of using the PGP web of trust for something other than email.

My work at Okta on key pinning introduced me to Python's outstanding cryptographic library "cryptography". And most recently, my work on converting JWK formatted keys to PEM formatted keys proved how useful a command line utility for key conversion could be.

Learn more

$ lokey --help
$ lokey fetch
$ lokey to