Nerde Nolzda

Zeronet Offline Signing

As can be seen here, this site now has a Zeronet mirror. In the process of creating the mirror, I figured it would be nice to sign the site (content.json) on a separate vault VM in Qubes OS so that the chances of the private key leaking is minimalized. However, there did not seem to be any articles about achieving such a thing at the time. As such, I will document my method in the following article.

  1. Create a (vault) VM and install Zeronet on it
    The official insturctions are here. It is recommended, however, that you use git clone https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet.git to clone the repo and verify the signatures before running.
    To verify the signature of the repo:
    cd ZeroNet/
    # Fetch the keys, the hex string is the public key at the time of writing
    gpg --recv-keys 960FFF2D6C145AA613E8491B5B63BAE6CB9613AE
    # Get latest commit
    COMMIT=`git log --oneline | head -n 1 | cut -f 1 -d ' '`
    # Verify the signature
    git verify-commit "$COMMIT"
    # If the command above outputs "Good signature", checkout the commit
    git checkout $COMMIT
    
  2. Cut off Internet access to the VM (i.e. set firewallVm to none)
  3. Create a key pair
    # Remember to save the private key somewhere safe
    ./zeronet.py siteCreate
    
  4. Modify the site
    Copy the files to data/[YOUR-PUBLIC-KEY].
  5. Sign the site
    # This will ask for your private key
    ./zeronet.py siteSign [YOUR-PUBLIC-KEY]
    
  6. Install Zeronet on another VM (You may have to have your port opened. Link and link)
  7. Copy your site directory (data/[YOUR-PUBLIC-KEY]) from the vault to the same directory on the Internet-connected VM
  8. Publish the site
    ./zeronet.py sitePublish [YOUR-PUBLIC-KEY]
    

And you’re finished. In theory, it should be possible to use qrexec and create something similar to split GPG in order to make the process simpler, and is definitely something I should look into.

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