Comment by brendyn

This project made me learn about and attempt to implement the SPAKE2 protocol and HKDF as an exercise. It's quite fascinating. It lets you upgrade a short password to a long key, but requires trusting a server to rate limit attempts on brute-forcing that short password. It seems difficult to find a practical use case for it tho. Because it's only relevant when it is impractical to send a long key. But if you think for a second, lets say you are transferring from a desktop to a phone, you can show a QR code and scan in with your phones camera, thus achieving a secure handshake bypassing the need for SPAKE2 all together. Maybe it would defeat the simplicity of the tool, but if it also provided a long string of words for the key, a user could optionally send all the words instead of just the first few and get themselves a secure key without needing to trust the server.