GPG ANSI Art Injector

A Python tool I vibed to inject colorful ANSI art and text into your OpenPGP public key. When someone fetches your key using curl or cat, they see your custom design before the standard GPG key block.

Inspired by the key hosted at lexi.re/pgp which I saw in the 39C3 talk about GPG, more at gpg.fail.

Created by [email protected] for absolute no sane reason.

Feel free to create pull requests including new desings!

Demo

You can find additional screenshots in DEMO.md and animated gifs in DEMO_GIFS.md.

Static art

Dynamic art

🎨 How It Works

Standard PGP software processes input as a stream of packets. This tool exploits that behavior by prepending a Literal Data Packet (Tag 11) containing raw ANSI escape codes immediately before your Public Key Packet (Tag 6).

1. Packet 1 (Literal Data): Contains your ANSI art. gpg (and shells) interpret this as "text to display" and print it to the console, rendering the colors.
2. Packet 2 (Public Key): The actual key data. gpg recognizes the start of the key structure and processes it normally.

This allows the file to remain a valid, importable GPG key while displaying custom art in the terminal.

Usage

1. Prerequisites

• Python 3.x
• No external dependencies required (uses standard library).

2. The Command

Run the injector script to combine your clean public key with a design script.

python3 gpg_injector.py \
    --input your_clean_key.asc \
    --script designs/warning.py \
    --output result_key.asc \
    --text "Verifying Identity... [OK]"

Arguments:

• -i, --input: Path to your original, clean public key (ASCII armored).
• -s, --script: Path to the Python module containing the design logic.
• -o, --output: Path to save the final "hacked" key.
• -t, --text: (Optional) Custom text to display below the art (e.g., instructions).

Test it!

You can test it locally by using cat.

cat result_key.asc | gpg -q

Or upload result_key.asc to your server or GitHub. Then test it:

curl -s https://example.com/key.asc | gpg

🖌️ Creating New Designs

Designs are modular Python scripts. You can write your own or ask an AI to generate them for you.

Example Design Module (designs/warning.py)

A design script must define exactly one function: get_payload(custom_text).

def get_payload(custom_text=""):
    red_bg = "\033[41m"
    white_fg = "\033[97m"
    reset = "\033[0m"
    
    msg = " DANGER: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS "
    
    # Simple box logic
    line = f"{red_bg}{white_fg}{msg}{reset}"
    
    art = f"\n{line}\n"
    
    if custom_text:
        art += f"{custom_text}\n"
    else:
        art += "\n"
        
    return art

AI Prompt for new Templates

Want a new design? Copy and paste this prompt into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini:

I need a Python module for a CLI tool that injects ANSI art into PGP keys.

Please write a Python script that defines exactly one function: def get_payload(custom_text=""):

Requirements:

The function must return a single string containing the ANSI art.

It must handle the custom_text argument: if present, append it below the art with a newline; if empty, just ensure the string ends with a newline.

Use standard ANSI escape codes for colors (e.g., \033[48;5;Nm for 256-color background).

Ensure the art resets colors (\033[0m) at the end of every line to prevent bleeding.

Start the string with \n to separate it from the shell command.

The Design Request: [INSERT YOUR IDEA HERE, e.g., "A retro neon synthwave sunset using block characters"]

Notes, Disclaimer & Limitations

GUI Compatibility: While this works perfectly in terminals (curl, cat, CLI gpg), importing this key into GUI tools (like Thunderbird/Enigmail or Kleopatra) may display the raw ANSI escape codes as "garbage" text in the import confirmation dialog. The key itself remains valid.

Packet Structure: This tool relies on the OpenPGP standard's tolerance for stream processing. It uses "New Format" packet encoding (RFC 4880).

Video sequences: Up to the terminal the speed of the animation may vary. Some terminals run with lightning speed, where others are rendering in a normal speed. Unfortunate there is no way controlling the playback behavior of different terminals.

Video recording and transformation into gifs

The videos have been recorded using asciinema and have been converted with agg. Speed has been set to 0.1-0.15 for more realistic playback behavior.

# Recording
asciinema rec -c "cat key.asc | gpg -q" output.cast

# Clone and build agg using docker
git clone https://github.com/asciinema/agg
docker build -t agg . 

# Convert cast to gif
docker run --rm -it -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -v $PWD:/data agg output.cast output.gif --speed 0.15 --rows 25 --cols 80