How to make cold keys on Air gapped maschine

Staking & Delegation Stake Pool Security
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#1

Hi - Coincashew suggests to generate the cold key offline on an air gapped maschine by exporting the binaries form the server and running the key-gen on the offline maschine.

What exactly do i have to download from my server? Is it the cardano-cli directory? Help would be appreciated!
BRGDS

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#2

If you download the wallet binaries, you will have everything that you need.
You can find them here: https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-wallet/releases
Perhaps also have a look at this: https://gist.github.com/ilap/3fd57e39520c90f084d25b0ef2b96894
That other link shows you a way to create a wallet that you can use as an operator but that will be still visible in your Daedulus wallet. Don’t forget to read my comments.
In the following video Charles Hoskinson specifies what is meant with an air gapped machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqrAzBAi64c&t=1556s

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#3

Thank you for your reply!

But I do not understand. The tutorial at Coincashew says “Copy from your hot environment, your block producer node, a copy of the cardano-cli binaries to your cold environment, this air-gapped offline machine. You can use USB keys or other secure file transfer method.”

Can you translate this to me? I’m sorry if its a dumb question but I really want to learn this whole stuff…

BRGDS

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#4

Then both environments would need to be the same. You can’t use a linux binary on a windows system and vice versa.

#5

I think I got it please confirm:

The binary files are the ones in my server’s /bin folder named cardano-cli and cardano-node. If i put them in my air gapped maschine’s /bin directory I’ll be able to execute the cardano-cli commands on my air gapped maschine.

#6

Yes that’s correct.

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#7

Sometimes you will need the libsodium libraries. Depends on platform.

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#8

Does that still work if the server is Ubuntu and the air gaped is Mac OS X?

#9

I’ve had problems going from 1 flavor of Linux to another. I can’t imagine it would be any better going from Linux to MacOS.

#10

You can find the binaries for all operating systems here:
cardano-wallet.

#11
#12

For clarifcation may it helps further reader:
In my case the binaries have been under /usr/local/bin and not /bin/

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