Key Management Overview

sscd and Key Management

sscd stores and manages your key pairs. You can either create a new key or import your existing key(s).

These keys may be in any format as long as the format is supported by the Tendermint crypto library. It can be used by light-clients, full nodes, or any other application that needs to sign with a private key.

The keyring supports the following backends:

Backend	Description
os	Uses the operating system's default credentials store.
file	Uses encrypted file-based keystore within the app's configuration directory. This keyring will request a password each time it is accessed, which may occur multiple times in a single command resulting in repeated password prompts.
kwallet	Uses KDE Wallet Manager as a credentials management application.
pass	Uses the pass command line utility to store and retrieve keys.
test	Stores keys insecurely to disk. It does not prompt for a password to be unlocked and it should be use only for testing purposes.

kwallet and pass backends depend on external tools. Refer to their respective documentation for more information: KWallet https://github.com/KDE/kwallet pass https://www.passwordstore.org/

The pass backend requires GnuPG: https://gnupg.org/

Supported Functions

To view key management function supported by `sscd`, refer to the output below

$ sscd keys --help
Usage:
  sscd keys [command]

Available Commands:
  add            Add an encrypted private key (either newly generated or recovered), encrypt it, and save to <name> file
  delete         Delete the given keys
  export         Export private keys
  import         Import private keys into the local keybase
  list           List all keys
  list-key-types List all key types
  migrate        Migrate keys from amino to proto serialization format
  mnemonic       Compute the bip39 mnemonic for some input entropy
  parse          Parse address from hex to bech32 and vice versa
  rename         Rename an existing key
  show           Retrieve key information by name or address

Flags:
  -h, --help                     help for keys
      --home string              The application home directory (default "/home/ashish/.ssc")
      --keyring-backend string   Select keyring's backend (os|file|kwallet|pass|test|memory) (default "test")
      --keyring-dir string       The client Keyring directory; if omitted, the default 'home' directory will be used
      --output string            Output format (text|json) (default "text")

Global Flags:
      --log_format string   The logging format (json|plain) (default "plain")
      --log_level string    The logging level (trace|debug|info|warn|error|fatal|panic) (default "info")
      --trace               print out full stack trace on errors

Use "sscd keys [command] --help" for more information about a command.