Magic Wormhole - open source solution for instant filesharing

Recently, I have found out about an awesome way for sharing a file from local machine to a friend without the need to use any proprietary service.

The command line program is called… Magic Wormhole, quite fittingly. I found out about this program reading about the problem with PGP, where it was listed as an alternative for encrypting data and sending it via e-mail. I have to say, it gives pretty nice promises about the security:

The wormhole tool uses PAKE “Password-Authenticated Key Exchange”, a family of cryptographic algorithms that uses a short low-entropy password to establish a strong high-entropy shared key. This key can then be used to encrypt data. wormhole uses the SPAKE2 algorithm, due to Abdalla and Pointcheval.

Here's one sentence from that article that really for me better than any sales pitch ever (emphasis mine):

It’s easy (for nerds, at least), secure, and fun: we haven’t introduced wormhole to anyone who didn’t start gleefully wormholing things immediately just like we did.

I must say I am one of those people :)

External links

• Magic Wormhole source code
• docs