Thread - Hyper

GHOST 🛡️ 2 months ago

I'm honestly curious how many people I am going to piss off with this piece

PGP Rotation and Nostr Identity: A Modern System for Secure Digital Ownership

Most people still cling to decade long PGP keys that collapse under real world pressure. Learn how rotating PGP keys and a durable Nostr identity c...

Replies (13)

brito 🛡️ 2 months ago

Rather than pissed, I'm happy to see a relevant proposal. Now waiting to address the elephant in the room which are rotational nostr key pairs using a master nostr key. Good write-up. At which time of the year should the key be rotated? Does it need exactness in the sense of being in the same day next year? Sorry if this misses the point but I'm looking at this from an implementation perspective. If usable, will implement on geogram for signing emails effortlessly.

GHOST 🛡️ 2 months ago

↩ replying to brito

Rotation doesn’t need exact dates. Just fixed epochs so clients can deterministically derive subkeys from a master key. Yearly is clean enough. At that point rotation is a UX decision more than a cryptographic one.

Crypto Analysis Dynamo 2 months ago

Suspect whilst you are more along this path, am sharing similar concerns. Good article.

LiberLion 🛡️ 2 months ago

THIS IS AWESOME!! The important thing here is the idea of how to use cryptographic systems in a coordinated way. This opens the door to much more cypherpunk creativity. The crucial point of the design is the strategic coordination of cryptographic systems to solve identity and ownership problems that a single protocol (such as traditional PGP) could not handle alone. Congrats!

GHOST 🛡️ 2 months ago

↩ replying to LiberLion

Most of the innovation won’t come from new protocols. It comes from combining the ones we already trust in smarter ways.

5atoshiNakamoto 2 months ago

This is great. Wondering if the current year PGP key needs to or should also first sign the next year's key, authenticating a chain? Maybe I'm missing something about the rotation process.

GHOST 🛡️ 2 months ago

↩ replying to 5atoshiNakamoto

You can chain sign yearly keys, but it isn’t required. The rotation model works even without a continuity chain because the trust anchor isn’t the old key. It’s the signature from your Nostr identity that ties each yearly PGP key back to you. That keeps compromise blast radius small without forcing a long trust chain.

5atoshiNakamoto 2 months ago

↩ replying to GHOST

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👻 2 months ago

As someone who is into pgp and more recently into nostr, looks interesting I will give it a close look at 👀 thank you!

Sebastix 🛡️ 2 months ago

Could this be a solution for delta.chat? There the identity (mail account) is still tied to the server..

Alexander Hoff ❍ 🛡️ 2 months ago

cool idea but aren't nostr keys hot and hard to safeguard when used daily? i'd love to take this a step further and have a master-nostr-key that stays offline and that can create derivative "hot" keys with automatic follower within the key-family-tree.

GHOST 🛡️ 2 months ago

↩ replying to Alexander Hoff ❍

They’re hot only because clients force them to be. There’s nothing in the protocol that says the nsec has to live on a daily use device. That’s just UX inertia. The protocol just says: A user has a keypair. Everything else is implementation detail. If Nostr ever adds native key hierarchies, you’d get exactly what you’re describing: offline root and deterministic hot keys. What I’d like to see is epoch rotation on top of that. Treat the nsec as an offline root that never touches a live client, and use it only to deterministically derive the ‘hot’ operational keys you actually use for a given epoch (year, quarter, whatever). Clients then follow the derived key, not the root, and can auto roll forward when a new epoch key appears in the same family. The root stays cold, the hot keys rotate on a schedule, and a compromise only burns that epoch instead of your entire identity history. A modernized key hierarchy model: Root nsec (offline, cold) -> deterministic derivation -> epoch subkeys (hot, operational) -> clients follow epochs -> rotation becomes normal, safe, automatic This is the same key lifecycle model used everywhere else encryption has matured.

Alexander Hoff ❍ 🛡️ 2 months ago

↩ replying to GHOST

this is maybe the best summary of where i assumed nostr key mgmt would already be at this point. also it would be 100% backwards compatible with not using derivative subkeys if users chose not to.