Thread by @patio11

Some people might not know Magic Wormhole exists. It's a great way to transfer files or text (passwords, API keys, etc) synchronously and securely between two computers without leaving a copy on any sort of online system.

Used it for a lot of secrets when booting up new machine.

The UX is:

(sender)
$ wormhole send <filename>
# You get a magic human pronounceable passphrase here

(receiver)

$ wormhole receive
# You are prompted for that passphrase; no addressing, VPN, etc necessary.

Available via homebrew (magic-wormhole), your package manager of choice, or source here:

github.com/warner/magic-w…

A particular thing I like about it is the case where you need to give someone else an API key or similar over Slack but you don't want to think "Alright in which future world states do I care keenly that Slack had that API key?"

The passphrase looks something like 7-letterhead-endorse which you could hypothetically wormhole right now with no coordination necessary to grab a trivial text string, if you beat everybody else reading this tweet.

And while Signal is great for transferring a secret directly to a human it is less great for transferring a secret directly to a machine via a human.

Wormhole closed by someone connecting to it successfully :)

"What's the difference?"

Assuming Alice trusts coworker Bob but doesn't necessarily trust anyone who in future steals Bob's cell phone, Alice may want to coordinate with Bob to install a code on a server w/o Bob retaining a copy on his very pickpocketable device by default.