Post by George KadianakisPost by Patrick SchleizerHi,
is it possible to derive an hidden service onion v3 private key from a
mnemonic seed [1]?
Cheers,
Patrick
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase
I think that should be possible reading
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki .
I don't think there is anything that stops us from taking the generated
onion private key, splitting it up as specified, and assigning a
mnemonic to it. You could imagine a third-party tool that just reads the
privkey file and outputs the mnemonic, or reads the mnemonic and
generates a privkey file.
Not sure if this belongs to the upstream Tor code, but I guess it if it
gains enough popularity something can be arranged ;)
Indeed, it should be possible. I have discussed on a chat with one of
the authors of BIP39 about this just before v3 HS code was here and
there's nothing that prevents it.
This is under my attention, as well as, offline master keys for onion
services. These two items go together very well, and I think there
should be part of Tor code and documented in the manuals, so less
experienced users avoid to use third party scripts that they do not
understand.
This way one can hold on to an onion service for so long time, being
able to restore from a human memorable (or at list write-able on paper)
phrase and also make it seized-proof.