Last Updated on November 22, 2024
Magic Wormhole lets you transfer files and directories from one computer to another.
The package provides a library and a command-line tool named wormhole, which makes it possible to get arbitrary-sized files and directories (or short pieces of text) from one computer to another. The two endpoints are identified by using identical “wormhole codes”: in general, the sending machine generates and displays the code, which must then be typed into the receiving machine.
The codes are short and human-pronounceable, using a phonetically-distinct wordlist. The receiving side offers tab-completion on the codewords, so usually only a few characters must be typed. Wormhole codes are single-use and do not need to be memorized.
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 Pointcheval1.
PAKE effectively trades off interaction against offline attacks. The only way for a network attacker to learn the shared key is to perform a man-in-the-middle attack during the initial connection attempt, and to correctly guess the code being used by both sides. Their chance of doing this is inversely proportional to the entropy of the wormhole code. The default is to use a 16-bit code (use –code-length= to change this), so for each use of the tool, an attacker gets a 1-in-65536 chance of success. As such, users can expect to see many error messages before the attacker has a reasonable chance of success.
This is free and open source software.
Website: github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
Support:
Developer: Brian Warner
License: MIT License
Magic Wormhole is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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