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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The tool for this that everyone I know uses is Magic Wormhole. Wormhole has a more straightforward security model and is more thoughtfully designed: it uses a PAKE and relies on out-of-band secret sharing, rather than attempting a registry of "verified" public keys.

You should probably just use Wormhole.

    pip install magic-wormhole

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Isn't there only 65K passwords/magic keywords in wormhole ? What if someone constantly bruteforce all of these combinations, wouldn't he get access to the files that you are sending ?

This is covered in their docs, along with mitigation.

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/attacks.html

The short answer is that PAKE is single-use, so the attacker only gets one guess (and their attempt prevents the legitimate peer from trying either). Each time they consume someone else's transfer attempt, they get a 1-in-65k chance of succeeding, and a 65535-in-65536 chance of alerting the peer that they failed.

For the attacker to have a 50/50 chance of successfully stealing your file transfer, you'd have to (on average) re-run the `wormhole send` program over 30000 times. I don't know about you, but I'm not that patient, and I'd give up long before they had a significant chance of success :).

That's cool, and I'm going to give it a go: thanks for raising it.

> The two endpoints are identified by using identical "wormhole codes": in general, the sending machine generates and displays the code, which must then be typed into the receiving machine. > The codes are short and human-pronounceable, using a phonetically-distinct wordlist. The receiving side offers tab-completion on the codewords, so usually only a few characters must be typed. Wormhole codes are single-use and do not need to be memorized.

I love that they've put some thought into usability here: that's nice.

BTW it's been in debian+ubuntu for a couple of years, so `apt install magic-wormhole` works too.

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