What paperkey does
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. For example, the regular DSA Elgamal secret key I just tested comes out to 1281 bytes. The secret parts of that (plus some minor packet structure) come to only 149 bytes. It’s a lot easier to re-enter 149 bytes correctly. — Paperkey - an OpenPGP key archiver
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. For example, the regular DSA Elgamal secret key I just tested comes out to 1281 bytes. The secret parts of that (plus some minor packet structure) come to only 149 bytes. It’s a lot easier to re-enter 149 bytes correctly. — Paperkey - an OpenPGP key archiver
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