Magic Wormhole – A simple and secure way to send files from Linux Command Line

Meet Magic Wormhole is a simple and free utility that help users to send a files from one computer to another computer anywhere in the world.

It’s a fast and secure way to send files to Linux and macOS users. Even newbies can send files through wormhole easily since it doesn’t require much of technical knowledge and offers very simple syntax.

If you want to send a file over the internet to someone, either you have to send an email or upload into any cloud-based service. If you don’t trust these and want to send a file directly to someone securely without intermediaries, what to do? that’s where SPAKE2 come into picture.

How to do? You just open a terminal and type wormhole command then send and finally add a File which you want to send that’s it. It will generate a one time human readable code, which needs to be apply while receiving the file on destination user end.

We can send text, files and folders (It can be automatically zipped) through wormhole. The two endpoints (Source and Destination computers) are identified by using identical “wormhole codes”: in general, the sending machine generates and displays the code, which must then be typed into the receiving machine.

Suggested Read : Transfer.sh – Easy And Fast Way to Share Files From The Command-Line

Even it’s human readable, the receiving end no need to type full code since it’s offers tab-completion on the codewords, so type few characters then double press tab to complete the code.

It uses SPAKE2 is a Password authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol that allows parties that use the same password to negotiate and authenticate a shared key or session key (“key exchange”). It’s a cryptographic algorithms that uses a short low-entropy password to establish a strong high-entropy shared key, also used to encrypt data.

The program does not have any built-in timeouts, however it is expected that both clients will be run within an hour. Both users get a notification in terminal during and after the file transfer is complete.

How to install Wormhole in Linux

It can be install through pip package to all major Linux distributions. In order to install Wormhole, Make sure your system have python and python-pip packages as a prerequisites.

pip is a python module bundled with setuptools, it’s one of the recommended tool for installing Python packages in Linux.

For Debian/Ubuntu, use apt-get command or apt command to install pip.

$ sudo apt install python-pip

For RHEL/CentOS, use YUM command to install pip.

$ sudo yum install python-pip python-devel

For Fedora, use dnf command to install pip.

$ sudo dnf install python-pip

For Arch Linux, use pacman command to install pip.

$ sudo pacman -S python-pip

For openSUSE, use Zypper Command to install pip.

$ sudo pacman -S python-pip

Run the following pip command to install Wormhole.

$ sudo pip install magic-wormhole

Alternatively you can install wormhole package from distribution official repository to Debian, Ubuntu, LinuxMint, and Arch based systems.

For Debian 9 (Stretch) and Ubuntu 17.04+ systems.

$ sudo apt-get install magic-wormhole

Arch Linux based systems, enable AUR helpers either yaourt or packer to install Wormhole.

$ packer -S magic-wormhole
or
$ yaourt -S magic-wormhole

How to use Wormhole

As I told in the beginning of article, it’s not a big deal to perform the activity.

Just run the following command to send a file.

$ wormhole send

To Receive the file, just run the following command and enter the code.

$ wormhole receive 4-letterhead-spearhead 

After successfully received, both will get a confirmation.