Factory reset

There are two types of factory resets for Nitrokey Storage 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 and the Encrypted Volume without performing a factory reset.

Note

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

The factory reset can be triggered in the Nitrokey App with the menu entry Configure->Special Configure->Factory reset.

Note

The factory reset is an administrative function and is only available after starting the Nitrokey App with the parameter --admin.

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	yes [2]
Destroys Encrypted Volume	yes [1]	yes [1]	yes [1]

[1] (1,2,3,4,5)

Clears the encryption key without overwriting the encrypted data.

[2]

This is expected to change in new Nitrokey Storage firmware versions.