Paperkey for Revocation Certificates? (Feature-Request :-)

[David Shaw]

On Oct 6, 2008, at 3:25 PM, Morton D. Trace wrote:

> David Shaw wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 08:03:12AM +0200, Sven Radde wrote:
>>> Am Sonntag, den 05.10.2008, 19:49 -0400 schrieb David Shaw:
>>>> A revocation certificate, on the other hand, doesn't
>>>> have all that much that can be removed.  Luckily revocation
>>>> certificates are pretty short to begin with.  The only real  
>>>> advantage
>>>> that paperkey could bring to revocation certificates is the per- 
>>>> line
>>>> CRC, which makes retyping easier.
>>> Yes, that's the point.
>
>
> NAME
>     uuencode, uudecode - encode a binary  file,  or  decode  its
>     encoded representation
>
> SYNOPSIS
>     uuencode [source-file] decode_pathname
>
>     uuencode [-m] [source-file] decode_pathname
>
>     uudecode [-p] [encoded-file]
>
>     uudecode [-o outfile] [encoded-file]
>
>
> uuencode  -m  .gnupg/secring.gpg   ./
>
> Does the trick for me.
>
> Less than 100 lines and good paper printable.

Why would you use uuencode, when GPG actually has that built in?

   gpg --armor --export-secret-keys

But you seem to be missing the point.  Uuencode (or GPG armor) creates  
lines that are very difficult to type in.  There are no spaces, and  
the character set includes uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and  
symbols.  There is no CRC to help you type it back in again, so if  
there is an error, you must proofread the whole file.  Plus, as you  
say, it's around 100 lines long.

The same key run through paperkey is only the letters A-F and numbers  
0-9.  There are per-line CRCs so if there is a problem, you know which  
line to examine.  And it's just 10 lines long.  A bit easier to  
handle, no?

David