Is keys.pub A Worthy Successor To Keybase?
Day 15 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:
Yesterday I gave my own thoughts on the recent acquisition of Keybase by Zoom. As I said yesterday, and will probably keep saying until Zoom discontinues Keybase, I’m not going to delete my Keybase account and will continue to see what Zoom does with it. That doesn’t mean I’m not eyeing other products to see if one of them might be a worthy successor to Keybase. Is keys.pub the one?
I should start this out by admitting that I know next to nothing about keys.pub, but it has caught my attention. Maybe it’s just the timing, or maybe it’s the fact that the name sound similar to Keybase (they both have “key” right?), but it’s been in my mind lately.
So, is keys.pub the next thing?
Let’s look at what it does (this is copy and paste right from their site).
- Manage cryptographic keys, sigchains and user identities.
- Search for keys, verify and import them.
- Securely store passwords and secrets.
- Encrypt, decrypt, sign, verify (using Saltpack).
- Create a secure connection (Wormhole) between 2 computers (using Noise).
- Most features available in both the app and on the command line.
- 100% open source (github.com/keys-pub) and cross platform (macOS, Windows, Linux).
So, it seems to have some of the same features Keybase has. It’s missing quite a few of the others, like integrated chat, git, and even crypto-currency.
It appears to do exactly the stuff I never use Keybase for and doesn’t do all the stuff that I do use Keybase for. That’s not a good sign. There’s also this which concerns me:
WARNING
This project is in development and has not been audited.
What it does have over Keybase is it’s not currently owned by Zoom (that’s a big one), and it’s fully open source.
It’s got a big list of features coming soon.
Coming Soon
- Other key types like age?
- Legacy/pgp?
- Better documentation
- More services (Facebook, Website)
- Inbox
- Import SSH ed25519 keys
- Wormhole through relays (syncthing)
- Syncthing integration
As well as these:
Coming soon: Backup keys/secrets to your private self-hosted storage on S3, GCP, Dropbox, etc.
Coming soon: Support for hardware keys like SoloKeys, YubiKeys, FIDO2.
Coming soon: Mobile apps.
There’s a lot of stuff in this list I like. Maybe this combined with something like Matrix will suite my needs? It’s hard to say right now. There’s a lot of promises but it’s still pretty feature light.
I guess I’ll add this to my wait and see list too. I’ll wait and see what Zoom does with Keybase and I’ll wait and see what keys.pub does with it’s feature list.
Revised 05/09/2020 @ 11:51PM
Looking for comments? There are no comments. It's not that I don't care what you think, it's just that I don't want to manage a comments section.
If you want to comment, there's a really good chance I at least mentioned this post on Fosstodon, and you can reply to me there. If you don't have a Mastodon account, I'd suggest giving it a try.
If you don't want to join Mastodon, and you still want to comment, feel free to use my contact information.
Also, don't feel obligated, but if you feel like buying me a ☕ cup of coffee ☕ I won't say no.