Using Nitrokey on Android Phones

Finally it is possible to use Nitrokey on Android smartphones. OpenKeychain, the popular Android app for OpenPGP encryption, supports Nitrokey. You can use your private keys on your Nitrokey to encrypt, decrypt and sign emails using OpenKeychain. Before you get too excited, a USB adapter cable is required which obviously doesn’t offer optimal usability. But this will no longer be required with future Nitrokey releases (stay tuned!) and is just the first step towards making Nitrokey “mobile friendly”.

19.9.2017

Comments

Yay! nfc ;) I hope it will support 4k

This is great news, I'll make sure to try this on my phone.
The reason I stopped using pgp on my phone was the nitrokey, (and deleting electronic copies of the keys,) now I can finally use pgp on the go once again.

Good news! I'd be great to see an easy mobile  integration available. (I do not want to store my private keys on the mobile device) I still need to use Yubikey for reading/writing my mails on the mobile.

I hope to see an USB Type-C for the storage version. It's the only reason I don't have one yet.

We all would be pleased to see a Micro-USB as it is still the most commonly used charging standard for electronic gadgets

I'm really pleased to see an ed25519 enabled NFC token XD

Any news on a NFC capable device? Rough estimate on timeline?

We aren't building a NFC capable device (and never said we will). USB Type C is in the pipeline.

I look forward to the type c! The inability to use my smartphone with it is what's keeping me from purchasing a nitrokey

Are there any reason for not building in NFC support? It would be really really great to not have to carry around a usb-cable just to use it with your phone.

You are welcome to start developing NFC support. Hey, it's open source. :-)

We might add NFC support in the future but are currently busy with other developments.

Oh! I thought it needed specific hardware support to be able to use NFC and that is was not only a code issue. Sadly i'm not a programmer :-/ But if it's just a matter of code, I hope someone else will!

The hardware doesn't contain NFC either and would need to be changed too.

Unless you actually plan to encrypt emails, using this on a mobile device for 2 factor is irrelevant. Using another major brand does this: Login in once with NFC and it is always and forever in the Android phone unless you delete the key or something. So no need to reenter password and reuse key to login to email, etc. Anyone with access to phone can access it. So why spend money on hardware upgrade etc to develop this with NFC? Most people NEVER encrypt their email, and use these mainly for the initial 2 factor auth, which makes the phone a trusted device and prevents someone from logging in to your email from elsewhere. 

basic point multiplication still not supported. means you can't use this with other cryptosystems. makes sense to just provide that, and not have to support every protocol invented. ie: just pair the keys without all the hashing that messes up multisig and other protocols.

Add new comment

Fill in the blank.