One of the hardest parts of starting a new project is finding a catchy, easy to pronounce and easy to spell name. I’m writing a set of utilities for managing GPG on a LUKS partition that will do the following:

  • Create a LUKS partition and copy your GPG homedir to it
  • Provide a wrapper for gpg that will automatically mount the partition and then, if the user wishes, automatically call the unmounter in X minutes
  • The unmounter would unmount your gpg directory and copy your pubring to the mount target once the LUKS partition was unmounted. This permits you to do things which don’t require your private key without having to mount the encrypted partition
  • The LUKS partition could be on a USB flashdrive or LVM lv

I’ve been using a prototype I hacked together for the past few months… I would imagine it useful for those who have multiple laptops and desktops, all under their own control, but who don’t want to have copies of their private key spread out all over the place… therefore they just plug USB key in computer A, and when they need to go work on computer B, they just take their key with them… I would also imagine it useful for those among us who are paranoid and want to backup their key to an encrypted USB stick, etc.

Anyways, the most creative names I’ve come up with are:

  • gnuks-utils — (GNupg lUKS) pretty boring, but it reminds be of Canuck :)
  • GLutils — Gnupg Luks… could be confused as something to do with OpenGL … the name is already taken anyways.
  • gpg-luks-utils — Has the advantage that the end user automatically knows it has something to do with GnuPG and LUKS :)

Any ideas?