Factory Reset

There are two types of factory resets for Nitrokey Pro devices:

• a factory reset of the OpenPGP smart card, for example using gpg --card-edit, followed by admin and finally: factory-reset

• a factory reset of the entire Nitrokey device using the Nitrokey App.

Also, it is possible to generate a new AES key that is used to encrypt the Password Safe without performing a factory reset.

Note

The Nitrokey App always generates a new AES key after performing a factory reset.

The following table describes the differences between these three operations:

Property	OpenPGP factory reset	Nitrokey factory reset	Generate AES key
Requires admin PIN	no	yes	yes
Destroys OpenPGP keys	yes	yes	no
Destroys Password Safe	yes [1]	yes	yes [1]
Destroys One-Time Passwords	no	yes	no

[1] (1,2)

Clears the encryption key without overwriting the encrypted data.