Understanding Drive and File Keys

Private Drives achieve privacy via end-to-end encryption facilitated by hash-derived "Keys". Drive Keys encrypt/decrypt Drive and Folder data, and File Keys encrypt/decrypt File Data.

The relationships among your data and their keys is as follows:

• Drive Key = functionOf(Wallet Signature, Randomly Generated Drive ID, User-specified Drive Password)
• File Key = functionOf(Randomly Generated File ID, Drive Key)

When you create private entities, the returned JSON data from the ArDrive CLI will contain the keys needed to decrypt the encrypted representation of your entity that is now securely and permanently stored on the blockweave.

To derive the drive key again for a drive, perform the following:

ardrive get-drive-key -w /path/to/my/wallet.json -d "6939b9e0-cc98-42cb-bae0-5888eca78885" -P

To derive the file key again for a file, perform the following:

ardrive get-file-key --file-id "bd2ce978-6ede-4b0d-8f79-2d7bc235a0e0" --drive-id "6939b9e0-cc98-42cb-bae0-5888eca78885" --drive-key "yHdCjpCK3EcuhQcKNx2d/NN5ReEjoKfZVqKunlCnPEo"