How To Install paperkey on Debian 10

Learn how to install paperkey on Debian 10 with this tutorial. paperkey is extract just the secret information out of OpenPGP secret keys

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install paperkey on Debian 10.

What is paperkey

paperkey is:

A reasonable way to achieve a long term backup of OpenPGP (GnuPG, PGP, etc) keys is to print them out on paper. The reasoning behind this is that paper and ink has amazingly long retention qualities - far longer than the magnetic or optical means that are generally used to back up computer data.

Due to metadata and redundancy, OpenPGP secret keys are significantly larger than just the “secret bits”. In fact, the secret key contains a complete copy of the public key. Since the public key generally doesn’t need to be escrowed (most people have many copies of it on various keyservers, web pages, etc), only extracting the secret parts can be a real advantage.

Paperkey extracts just those secret bytes and prints them. To reconstruct, you re-enter those bytes (whether by hand or via OCR) and paperkey can use them to transform your existing public key into a secret key.

There are three methods to install paperkey on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install paperkey Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install paperkey using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install paperkey

Install paperkey Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install paperkey using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install paperkey

Install paperkey Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install paperkey using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install paperkey

How To Uninstall paperkey on Debian 10

To uninstall only the paperkey package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove paperkey

Uninstall paperkey And Its Dependencies

To uninstall paperkey and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove paperkey

Remove paperkey Configurations and Data

To remove paperkey configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge paperkey

Remove paperkey configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove paperkey configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge paperkey

Dependencies

paperkey have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install paperkey package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.