Storing seeds digitally as safely as possible
357 sats \ 8 comments \ @pillar 30 Aug 2022 bitcoin
I would like to tease everyone's brain to find the soundest solution to the following hypothetical situation.
Imagine you are going to cross a border. You have Bitcoin in your own wallet and you want to be able to access it once you reach your destination. You want to apply the safest opsec, but you face the following constraints.
You can take nothing physical with you across the border. No HW wallet, no paper, absolutely nothing. Picture literally crossing through a Berlin-wall style border naked (and for the kinks, nothing up your ass either). You also won't be able to ship any physical goods through that border, neither before or after you cross it personally. Basically, both countries are completely cut-off in physical terms. Online platforms and web services, though, are accessible from any of the two locations.
You can assume you have access to any IT equipment you want both before and after crossing the border. You simply can't take it with you.
Besides the good old brain wallet, what would you do? Why is it the safest option? How does it fare against other alternatives?
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110 sats \ 1 reply \ @sgmoore 30 Aug 2022
https://www.borderwallets.com/
Upload your border wallet to a few different cloud services. Bring nothing across the border. Restore with new a offline Electrum cold-storage wallet when at a safe location. All the tools are free and open-source.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @1v6cm95h 31 Aug 2022
Never seen this method before. Good to know
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163 sats \ 1 reply \ @om 30 Aug 2022
You could encrypt it with AES-128 in python:
    from Cryptodome.Cipher import AES
    import codecs
    seed = b'abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon abandon'
    encrypted = AES.new(b'fuckgovernments!',A.MODE_EAX,nonce=b'yes,really').encrypt(seed)
    print(codecs.encode(encrypted, 'hex'))
and post here:
a1a28c63653165e11ab2ae306a62a5133734b025c42e5ef81576b6d6bde74ac65c2a3ccdef8cdba5c1a90c287d1380d26fc294b2b9f09ccb64b50bd4bbd651d941c7eeb42049958870c8e09720db2205d6e777aab69c3b6ec92750e89961d3
On the other side you do the same except .decrypt(encrypted) instead of .encrypt(seed).
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @zuspotirko 30 Aug 2022
loool. Love me some short adhoc Python scripts!
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @EnormousPony 30 Aug 2022
Open a port at home,better under tor, connect to it and download and encrypted file that contains the words.
The only catch is that you have to bring with you the public key. You could also host and download the public key from a different server with the same setup (tor and open port). To increase security both downloads can be password protected
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26 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 30 Aug 2022
Hide 12 words in a long text, online (blog, email letter, book, whatever). Example: in one of my btc guides on substack I put 12 words of a 1 BTC wallet. Good luck finding it after you read my guides.
Same seed is also backup in another forms (TailsOS USB stick, encrypted USB memory with encrypted password manager).
You can also use steganography to insert 12 words into a picture jpg. Example here:
https://i.postimg.cc/RCTcMwzv/cats-stego.jpg
I would just walk over the border with nothing.
Or with these :)
https://i.postimg.cc/qRJnvqCv/safe-cold-storage.jpg
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @EnormousPony 30 Aug 2022
I'm going to use the obfuscation trough book words, nice one
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 30 Aug 2022
If you're naked and can only cross with your body and you don't want a brain wallet:
  • tattoos
  • store encrypted in the cloud
  • physical mail
That's all I've got.
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