detssh

Deterministic Ed25519 SSH key generation from a seed passphrase. Same passphrase + same parameters → same keypair, every time, on any machine - nothing to back up but what's in your head.

detssh

Prompts for everything (passphrase hidden + confirmed) and writes to the same place ssh-keygen would: ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 / ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub (mode 600/700, ~/.ssh created if missing). Pass --output to write somewhere else instead.

Non-interactively:

detssh --kdf argon2id --salt-algo blake2b --seed "..." --label github --overwrite-files

Any flag switches to non-interactive mode: missing optional fields fall back to their defaults, --seed is the only required one. Passing --seed on the command line puts it in your shell history and process list (ps aux) - fine for local scripting, but prefer the interactive prompt when that matters.

By default the private key file is written unencrypted, like ssh-keygen -N "". Pass --key-passphrase (or leave it blank at the interactive prompt to skip) to encrypt it at rest instead - anyone who gets the file will still need that passphrase to use it. This is unrelated to the seed passphrase: it never touches key derivation, so it doesn't need to be remembered to recreate the key, only to unlock the file you already have. Same caveat as --seed applies if passed as a flag.

Using the key with ssh

ssh only auto-offers keys with default filenames (id_rsa, id_ed25519, ...) sitting directly in ~/.ssh/ - a key written under --output or a per-label subdirectory needs either -i <path>, a hand-written Host block in ~/.ssh/config, or ssh-adding it to your agent.

The interactive run offers to do this for you at the end, right after it writes the key:

Register this key so `ssh isik:personal:contabo` connects with it? [Y/n]: y
Destination (user@host): root@contabo.com
Non-default ssh port:

Registered isik:personal:contabo -> root@contabo.com
Run: ssh isik:personal:contabo

The label you derived the key with doubles as the Host name, so there's nothing extra to type. In flag mode, --register root@contabo.com (plus --register-port when it isn't 22) does the same thing, and needs --label for that reason. Declining changes nothing about the key that was written.

For a key you already have, detssh ssh register reaches the same end state:

detssh ssh register isik:personal:contabo root@contabo.com --key ~/.ssh/isik:personal:contabo/id_ed25519

Either route records the label in ~/.config/detssh/config, generates a Host block for it in a detssh-managed file, and adds a single Include line to ~/.ssh/config (once, at the top) that pulls it in. After that, ssh isik:personal:contabo just works - through real ssh, nothing routed through detssh at connect time.

detssh ssh list              # show registered labels
detssh ssh forget <label>    # remove a label (never deletes the key file)

Backends

• --kdf: argon2id (default), argon2i, argon2d, scrypt, pbkdf2, bcrypt_pbkdf
• --salt-algo: blake2b (default), blake2s, sha256, sha384, sha512, sha3_256, sha3_384, sha3_512

Each combination has its own options (cost knobs, salt digest size, etc.), with their valid ranges shown in both --help and the interactive prompts. See them with:

detssh --kdf <kdf> --salt-algo <salt-algo> --help

We recommend sticking with the defaults (argon2id, memory-hard with a high cost) unless you have a specific reason not to - they make brute-forcing your passphrase significantly more expensive than faster KDFs like pbkdf2.

Cost knobs (iterations, memory, cost, rounds, ...) also carry a soft safety limit meant to catch typos before they cost you minutes of derivation time. In interactive mode, going over one doesn't interrupt you - everything you exceeded is summarized in one confirmation at the very end. In flag mode, it fails immediately unless you pass --force-allow-soft-constraints.

Determinism guarantee

Same explicit parameters → same key, across any release sharing the same major version - only a major version bump may change key derivation. That guarantee starts at 1.0; we're still on 0.x, so it doesn't apply yet (see tests/golden/README.md).

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .

pytest runs with coverage on by default ([tool.pytest.ini_options] in pyproject.toml) and fails under 100% line+branch coverage - same gate locally and in CI, nothing extra to remember to pass.