Your friendly neighborhood cypherpunk anarchist software developer 🏴. I like Rust 🦀 and Nix ❄️. Use Tor 🧅, use SimpleX 🗨, use Monero 🪙.

🪪 Cryptographic Identity

You can verify you're talking to me or that I wrote something (like this document!) with SSH signatures. The following SSH fingerprint is mine, and all my git commits are signed with it:

SHA256:avery1FYMMQQsL00uBtkTn1yLej4kZ+M7cdttNchWeQ

And here is the corresponding public key file:

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIC/emPms+RPqHCckMTkE7pemmV4MW3eMBMHsRwZ/pDUw

✒️ Signatures

To verify something was signed by me, add the following line to ~/.ssh/allowed_signers:

avery@avery.st ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIC/emPms+RPqHCckMTkE7pemmV4MW3eMBMHsRwZ/pDUw

🛠️ Git Signatures

Git will now verify commit signatures, for example in my mrr project:

$ git log --show-signature
commit 215a002a33a4f1beb4a266d09231e66d1bb774f8 (HEAD -> main, origin/main)
Good "git" signature for avery@avery.st with ED25519 key SHA256:avery1FYMMQQsL00uBtkTn1yLej4kZ+M7cdttNchWeQ
Author: Avery <avery@avery.st>
Date:   Sun Apr 20 17:37:14 2025 -0500

    Implement vanity SSH key generator

📄 File/Message Signatures

If I send you a file message with a corresponding signature file message.sig, you can verify it as follows:

$ ssh-keygen -Y verify -f ~/.ssh/authorized_signers -I avery@avery.st -n file -s file.md.sig < file.md
Good "file" signature for avery@avery.st with ED25519 key SHA256:avery1FYMMQQsL00uBtkTn1yLej4kZ+M7cdttNchWeQ

More information about SSH signatures for arbitrary files can be found here.

🗝️ Encryption

🗨 Private Messages

If you need to reach out to me privately, please contact me on SimpleX for secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging.

✉️ Email

If you must contact me some other way, like over email, you can also encrypt a message to my SSH key using a tool like rage. If you put my public key in a file called avery.pub with the following contents:

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIC/emPms+RPqHCckMTkE7pemmV4MW3eMBMHsRwZ/pDUw

Then the following command given a file message encrypts the contents to a file called message.age that only my private SSH key can decrypt:

$ rage -R avery.pub message > message.age

Attach message.age in your email to me and leave the body of your email and the subject line empty to minimize metadata.

❓ Why not PGP?

I've chosen to use SSH over PGP because it is widely considered secure by cryptographers unlike PGP, and has good tools for signatures in git, making it an attractive foundation for cryptographic identity for a developer like myself.

🐘 Fediverse

You can follow me on Mastodon.

🐱 GitHub

You can follow me on GitHub.

🪙 Tips

If you like what I do, you can easily send Monero to the following address: 47averyEStBZhvddZqJPVPRXC9NRxT56vXwpRxSXHLrf6r4WDJdnGCbFPnqgn1noQmfLhZfgcWZiqWbgwjWoFkCLBtkq2iB.