Introduce gaiacli keys export / gaiacli keys import

[cwgoes]

We definitely need these prelaunch. They can come with extensive warnings.

Ideally we should do this in a standard format; the ASCII-armored one currently in the keybase implementation should be fine for now.

[cwgoes]

Brought up by @alessio - cc @ebuchman was this controversial?

[zmanian]

Our view has that people need to store their words and that's our portability solution.

I disagree that this is prelaunch cause no one will be able to transfer funds at launch.

[rigelrozanski]

second zmanian, exporting the seed phrase should be sufficient

[cwgoes]

second zmanian, exporting the seed phrase should be sufficient

That would be fine if it were possible but it isn't because we don't store the seed phrase. I think we want some export method that can happen after you first create the key, otherwise users who fail to write down their seed phrase - but still have the gaiacli DB and their password - will find it very difficult to recover their keys.

It's a non-breaking change - so OK on post-launch - I expect we'll get requests for this pretty quickly.

[jackzampolin]

Sounds like we still don't have gaiacli keys export

[alexanderbez]

Correct, we do not have this atm. As I see it, we can:

1. Expect users to write down/safely store their seeds (as they should as it is up to them) and this is generally a good practice users should be doing anyway. If they lose a seed -- they're screwed.
2. Potentially store the seed and allow that to be exported. I'm less worried about this now since we updated the permissions on the keys DB, so only a system user with the correct privileges would be able to execute such a command.

[alessio]

We can export the private key in ASCII format - provided that the user supply the correct mnemonic.

[alessio]

@alexanderbez storing the seed is in my opinion the most riskiest of all options

[alexanderbez]

The problem is that the users doesn't know the seed. They were silly and forgot to save it in a safe location.

[alessio]

I'll spike on this and demo something soon

[sabau]

So would the seed phrase be accessible in clear text or GPG signed -> requiring password to access it?

[alessio]

[Brain dump mode ON]

A malicious actor sits next to me. By mistake I run gaiacli keys export mykey and the seed is printed out. The seed is 24 word long, human intelligible text - not too hard to memorise/remember.
Had export generated a GPG- ASCII armored string of bytes it'd have been a way harder for them to memorise it.

[brain dump mode OFF]

[Kwaskoff]

and how import key when you saved generated key and didn't save "export" file?

[Kwaskoff]

gaiacli keys unsafe-import-eth-key keyname key