pgp-words is an implementation of the
PGP Word List. The
word list was designed to make it easy to convey sequences of bytes
using only voice, and is particularly suited for transmitting key
fingerprints and other similar sequences over the phone. Even in the
same physical place, it's easier to just read a bunch of words out
loud than to spell a sequence of hex digits (was that 3 times F or
3F?)
Each word represents exactly one byte. To avoid errors, there are
actually 512 words in the list (two per possible byte value) and words
are selected depending on the parity of the byte position. For
example, 0x9e is quiver if the byte position in the sequence is an
even number, onlooker if it is odd.
pgp-words is a single-file script written in Python, depends only on
core features, its source code is really short (314 SLOCs, 256 of them
being the word list) and can be easily audited. It should work on any
system with a Python interpreter, and is compatible with Python 2 and
3.
pgp-words reads a fingerprint or any other hexadecimal sequence,
either from the command line or the standard input, and converts it
into words:
$ pgp-words d1c2 25e4 26c6 33dd 94d1 a7e8 c3f4 08aa 9b34 2488
d1c2 25e4 26c6 33dd 94d1 a7e8 c3f4 08aa 9b34 2488:
stairway repellent bombast tradition
bookshelf responsive chisel tambourine
Pluto scavenger repay typewriter
snowcap Virginia aimless pedigree
puppy confidence bluebird maritime
gpg --fingerprint 0x33CDE511 | pgp-words
EA5B 81C5 6498 8C73 EE90 DEE9 BAF1 E072 33CD E511:
Trojan exodus minnow resistor
flytrap narrative offload hurricane
tycoon millionaire tactics ultimate
shadow vacancy tapeworm holiness
chisel sandalwood topmost Babylon
- When called with command-line arguments, it concatenates them and treats them as a single value.
- When called from stdin, it treats each lins as a single value and silently ignores invalid lines.
- For simplicity, spaces, tabs and newlines are ignored.
Either copy pgp-words somewhere in your $PATH and chmod +x pgp-words, or just run sudo python setup.py install from the root of the repository.
To uninstall, simply remove the pgp-words script from wherever you put it.