Re: [openpgp] Deriving an OpenPGP secret key from a human readable seed

[Jon Callas <[e-mail]>]

> 
> I hope some of this message makes sense.
> 

I think it makes sense. You're looking at having a way to seed a DRBG (PRNG), so that that seed can be used to deterministically generate a key, and that seed being reasonably small, and can be encoded in a way that's easy to store on paper as well as use for generating the same key later.

This sounds like a good idea, but as others have said, it's more general than OpenPGP. Really what you want is a standardized, loadable DRBG, and then that DRBG could be bolted into some OpenPGP implementation for key generation.

That latter part is software issue and really ought to be generalized beyond OpenPGP, and then some implementation of OpenPGP could have the feature of creating a key from such a loadable seed.

It sounds useful to some people, but outside the scope of OpenPGP documents, just as the design of other RNGs is beyond the scope of OpenPGP documents.

	Jon