Keyoxide CLI released

Posted on 2020-12-08

Five months ago when I made keyoxide.org public, one specific request made by quite a few people stood out: we need the ability to perform the identity verification locally. And given that it was a quite technical crowd, this meant: we need a command-line interface (CLI).

The command-line interface

Today, I'm pleased to announce the release of the CLI. Written in Node.js and published on Codeberg under the AGPL-v3.0-or-later license, the Keyoxide CLI uses the recently released doip.js library and does all the things the Keyoxide website does, but locally. This means you no longer need to trust the website of the Keyoxide instance you are using, its maintainer or everything inbetween.

Your machine fetches the keys, parses them locally and then directly requests the identity proofs from the service providers to verify the identity claims. Here's a quick tour.

Assuming you already have Node.js installed, first install the CLI:

npm install -g keyoxide

Then go and verify the identity proofs inside a cryptographic key! To get started, try out the key I use for testing:

keyoxide verify hkp:test@doip.rocks

You should now get the following result:

Verification results:
Yarmo Mackenbach (material for test frameworks) <test@doip.rocks>
  ✓ doip.rocks (dns)

And there you have it! Whoever generated this key verifiably owns the doip.rocks domain name.

Of course, the CLI can also fetch keys using WKD or get them from Keybase. More information about these protocols is available on the Keyoxide website and in the source code's readme document.

FOSS FTW

As always, this project is fully open source and I welcome all criticism and contributions, both issues and PRs. We all stand to benefit from solutions that are built for and by the people. As governments worldwide push for cryptographic backdoors, let us all keep using and promote free and open software.

Many thanks to NLnet for supporting me on this journey and allowing me to focus on these projects while keeping them free from VC funding and other means of monetization that could compromise the privacy of the individual.

If you value my efforts and would like to donate, it's possible to do so on the project's Liberapay page. Cheers and I'll see you in the next Keyoxide project update post!