Printing Keys and using OCR.

[David Shaw]

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 09:07:35AM -0500, Ryan Malayter wrote:

> I would suggest using plain old base64 ASCII and a large version of a
> font like OCR-A or OCR-B. You can include par2 information, also
> base64 encoded, but finding software to use that data for recovery may
> be difficult many years in the future. Simply printing multiple copies
> of the page for OCR and diffing for errors would probably be easier.

Yes.

I've actually done quite a bit of work on "paper escrow" systems like
this.  It tends to raise a few eyebrows, but in reality paper and ink
in a dark place has wonderful archival characteristics - better than
the usual CD-R, memory stick or (luckily not much used anymore)
floppy.

One trick that can be done when paper escrowing OpenPGP keys is to
only print the part you care about.  OpenPGP secret keys are heavily
padded with non-secret data.  In fact, the secret key contains a
complete copy of the public key.  Since the public key generally
doesn't need to be escrowed (most people have many copies of it on
various keyservers, web pages, etc, etc), it would not be hard to
write a program that extracts just the secret bytes and prints that.
To reconstruct, you'd re-enter those bytes (whether by hand or via
OCR) and use them to transform your public key into a secret key.

For example, the regular DSA+Elgamal secret key I just tested comes
out to 1281 bytes.  The secret parts of that (plus some minor packet
structure) come to only 149 bytes.  It's a lot easier to enter 149
bytes correctly.

David