I don’t like the idea to store on paper the seed words as I may loose that paper.
I would make lots of copies but then the fear that someone may find one of the many copies is even worse.
I would like to encrypt those seed words so that I can store them even on-line in emails and in many other places so that it is unlikely I will loose it and if someone finds them, they won’t be able to do anything with it.
with the words I would store a few questions that I only know the asnwer of as:
1.The name of your first crush?
2.The nickname they gave you in 3rd grade?
3.The motorbike you always wanted to buy?
4.The year you shaved for the first time?
and much more if possible.
then I will concatenate the question words down on a piece of paper:
firstcrushnicknamemotorbike2001
and make them in butch of 8 characthers:
example:
firstcru
shnickna
memotorb
ike2001f
…and repeat if necessary
Then I will use the spreadsheet in attachment to encrypt the seed words one by one, inserting 8 characters from the question words per time (so not to insert them all at once) as encrypting keyword for each seed word.
Of course if the question words are not enough or not matching, I will just repeat the letters until it does match as in the example above.
The question is:
is it safe as a process? can I be confident that having the encrypted seed words public or almost public is going to be safe?
Feel free to use and share my spreadsheet and method.
Also what is the difference between doing the above for the 12 words of a normal wallet and the 27 words of the paper wallet? is a paper wallet more secure just because it does never store the keys on computer?
No. Writing your own cipher is a horrible idea and it would probably get cracked if someone put their mind to it.
There’s also the danger of forgetting the exact password over time, especially if it’s this long. For this cipher to even have a chance at being halfway secure, you’d need a longer password than the backup phrase itself. To avoid this, you could write down the phrase unencrypted, laminate the paper to protect against water, then put it in a cheap fireproof safe.
If you must encrypt, use industry standard strong ciphers. For example, use GPG to encrypt the seed phrase with a password, encode it e.g. using Base58, then print it. Even then, I’d never put it online.
Yes, the paper wallet is more secure as it does not store your private key on the computer AND it utilizes 256 for entropy as opposed to 128-bit, 12-word entropy.
There’s also the danger of forgetting the exact password over time
that’s why I will use the personal questions to form the long password.
For this cipher to even have a chance at being halfway secure, you’d need a longer password than the backup phrase itself.
I can use lots of questions and have a password as long as the backup phrase. and maybe double and do two round of encryption?
No. Writing your own cipher is a horrible idea and it would probably get cracked if someone put their mind to it.
If you must encrypt, use industry standard strong ciphers. For example, use GPG to encrypt the seed phrase with a password, encode it e.g. using Base58, then print it. Even then, I’d never put it online.
right, not online then, but at least this way I could leave more papers around without it being an obvious wallet backup phrase with Cardano symbols on it that almost anyone aware of crypto can use.
Or is it really that simple to crack even with mine long password? someone really needs to put big effort into it to have a chance to crack it right? why would someone do that for a random weird paper he doesn’t know the use for?
