Show HN: Edky, a CLI to convert Ed25519 public keys from one encoding to another

6 points by arto 2 hours ago | 3 comments

Everything increasingly runs on Ed25519 keypairs, but Ed25519 public keys can be encoded as text in dozens of surface-incompatible different ways: hexadecimal, Base64 (OpenSSH), Base32z (iroh, pkdns), Base58 (NEAR), and Multibase (IPFS, libp2p), just for starters.

Edky is a command-line tool and Rust library that converts between these Ed25519 surface encodings, aiding use of the same underlying keypair across e.g. an iroh endpoint, a libp2p peer, or a NEAR Protocol account. (Surprisingly, a conversion utility like this didn't yet exist!)

    $ cargo binstall -y edky

    $ edky convert -f iroh -t libp2p 47pjoycnsrfmxikm95jh13y88e8qnhzu5kungjpxyepgt7a8krpy
    z6MktwupdmLXVVqTzCw4i46r4uGyosGXRnR3XjN4Zq7oMMsw

    $ edky convert -f libp2p -t iroh z6MktwupdmLXVVqTzCw4i46r4uGyosGXRnR3XjN4Zq7oMMsw
    47pjoycnsrfmxikm95jh13y88e8qnhzu5kungjpxyepgt7a8krpy

    $ edky convert -f near -t hex ed25519:FVen3X669xLzsi6N2V91DoiyzHzg1uAgqiT8jZ9nS96Z
    d75a980182b10ab7d54bfed3c964073a0ee172f3daa62325af021a68f707511a

    $ edky convert -f hex -t near d75a980182b10ab7d54bfed3c964073a0ee172f3daa62325af021a68f707511a
    ed25519:FVen3X669xLzsi6N2V91DoiyzHzg1uAgqiT8jZ9nS96Z

raphinou an hour ago |
Interesting. I'm using ed25519 keys in my open source project [1] to sign GitHub releases (amongst other things) and the encoding question appeared during the development. I settled on supporting reading ssh keys, but saving keys in a specific format. I'll need to have a look to possible revisit my choices as it is developed in rust too.
1: https://www.asfaload.com
Sources at https://github.com/asfaload/asfaload
arto an hour ago |
Cool project! Note that from the encodings currently implemented in Edky, OpenSSH's encoding is the most complicated to encode/decode. If anybody would need to be working with your public keys and signatures outside your own code base, I'd suggest the simplest would be to keep to hexadecimal or Base64(Url).
raphinou 12 minutes ago |
Thanks for the appreciation and the tip! I'll keep an eye on edky!
Asfaload is easy to selfhost, if it is of any interest to you.