This site is where I learned about the elegant ’login with lightning’ process, which I use Phoenix for. It got me to thinking, if my wallet seed is now also my only way to access my stacker.news account, imagine how much more it could do.
We’re already going to medieval lengths to weld our seed phrases onto titanium plates to preserve them, so why not lean on those phrases for a little more?
I’m talking about using my wallet for: encrypting files on the fly, generating PGP keys for encrypted email, accessing encrypted volumes, login for encrypted messenger, etc, etc.
I know it kind of goes against the UNIX philosophy to try and make a wallet into a Swiss Army knife of crypto tools, but considering how much effort goes into protecting and preserving our seed phrases, it only makes sense to get more use out of that backed up entropy.
Privacy by design also means using our secret keys as little as possible. Especially for stuff like encryption in every day activities one could generate new keys.
Don't get me wrong, as someone with a few years in cryptography I am all for moving from cold to hot. But we should make all of these steps with caution and use secure and battle hardened software from standard libraries verified by several eyes of the FOSS community.
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A seed phrase is a word based representation of a number (the private key) of a digital signature algorithm. This algorithm is not good for encrypting messages and would not redeem a PGP key (which is an entirely different algorithm.)
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With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about. Modern encryption is almost all hybrid methods. Of course it is possible to derive and exchange a symmetric key from any asymmetric key pair for AES or whatever.
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Okay, I genuinely thought they were incompatible, but its still a bad idea.
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The software to convert that type of entropy into those items simply isn’t written yet