lair_keystore

Secret lair private keystore

This crate mostly provides the lair-keystore executable allowing initialization, configuration, and running of a Lair keystore.

If you want to run an in-process keystore, this crate also provides the canonical sqlite store.

For making use of a Lair keystore in a client application, see the lair_keystore_api crate.

What is lair-keystore, and why does it exist?

Lair Keystore is a general asymmetric cryptographic private key store project originally written for Holochain, but intended to be usable for any application.

The store mainly tracks the "seed" data that for ed25519 and x25519 allow generation of keypairs, and can be thought of as synonymous with private keys.

Lair allows derivation of this seed material for usage similar to HD wallets, with the intention that an end-user could create a "root" seed, from which could be deterministically derived a revocation seed and any number of device and application seeds, which would all be retrievable from a securely stored paper mnemonic of the root. (This has not yet been implemented in Holochain).

Lair Keystore was originally intended to be a standalone binary. Given the overhead and security implications of having a process with access to private key material, it was originally envisioned that an end-user would run a single keystore on their system, and be prompted with a pin-entry UI that would unlock access to the private keys for a specified period of time, or every time an operation with a private key occurred in the case of "deep locked" seeds. (This has also not been implemented in Holochain, and moreover, Holochain has moved farther away from this intention by running Lair Keystore as an "in process" library which makes it easier to bundle executables).

[lair_keystore_api::LairClient] is the main type that is used to access the keystore, and it mainly functions over an IPC connection (unix domain sockets on Linux and MacOs, and named pipes on Windows). This type allows you to create, access, export, and import tagged seeds, and then, using either those tags or the public keys that are derived from those seeds, perform signing, verification, encryption, and decryption operations.

Rust conventions for dashes and underscores:

• Install with an underscore: cargo install lair_keystore
• Use binary with a dash: $ lair-keystore help
• Cargo.toml with an underscore:

[dependencies]
lair_keystore = "0.1.1"

• Library usage with underscores:

use lair_keystore::*;