BE CAREFUL - phishing attacks in progress
WARNING: We've received a few reports from users regarding falling victim to phishing attacks on Reddit. This entails being asked to send your 24-word recovery phrase, which they can use to steal your cryptocurrencies.
Ledger will NEVER ask for your 24-word recovery phrase and/or to make a transaction to us.
Here are a few Reddit accounts that had been reported to us:
CryptoHelpdesk
LedgerBot
LedgerHelp
We strongly encourage impacted users to file a police report in their jurisdiction. Should you have any doubts or if you think you might be targeted by a phishing attempt, please contact us immediately: https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Reminder: Never share your 24-word recovery phrase with anyone.
Posted Jul 31, 2019, 10:32 AM UTC
6318
I'm gonna write here again because that's important:
Never, ever, in any circumstances, write your seed on anything else than the Ledger. Do not take pics, do not print it, do not share it with anyone. Write it with a pen and paper, with no camera (laptop's webcam beware) or anyone else behind or near you, and store that paper in a safe location that only you know. The only time you will need to use it again is if you buy a new Ledger and want to recover your funds. That's it.
I will add that if you are going to write it (not advised because easily damaged) a pencil is better to use than a pen since the graphite will last longer. A better cold storage option is a titanium plate with punch in BIP39 numeric code! ColdTi has a great $20 product for this on Amazon!
Disclaimer: Not affiliated with ColdTi just happen to LOVE their product.
Thanks for the recommendation. But how do i write on that ColdTi Plate?
I like the cheap engraving tool I got from Amazon The punch method is too much hassle for me.
You need to use either an alphabetical punch set (metal rod with letter on end that you strike with a hammer) to write your words OR better yet just use the numeric punch set that comes with the coldTi wallet. That way you use the BIP39 encoder list to only punch the numbers that correlate with your 24 words to save you time and add an extra layer of security.
I think this one is better.
Easier to put your seed on
https://www.blockplate.com/
If you want longevity you want Titanium not Stainless Steel (which can also melt at ~half the temp), otherwise it’s interesting. Took me a bit to understand lol
Each to their own l guess
oh well, a thief finds this, knows what it is and punches you some additional holes in it and leaves it there. What do you do?
Um... move the coins you have in your wallet to another one?.............
It's only a back up.
There are devices that can scan of titanium/metal plates and decipher inprints, someone could scan a house and get the words so I would stick to paper
Lmao ur joking, right??
That's not enough. People have lost seeds in floods or fire (like the house burning down). A safe that can withstand water and fire can help but won't help if thieves destroy the wall and put the safe in their truck (thinking they'd find gold or something in it). FWIW there are stories about safe weighting several hundreds of kilos (metric system ftw btw) being stolen.
What I do: see split in several pieces and half the seed stored on another continent.
All my, handwritten, seeds have checkboxes saying: "Is there a copy of this partial seed on another continent?" "Has this half seed been succesfully used with another half seed to succesfully initialize an hardware wallet and access the coins?".
It's hard, very hard, to get this right (for example once when recopying a seed to make another handwritten copy I forgot a word and didn't notice immediately. Hence now the checkbox to see if partial seed has been used to succesfully reinitialize a wallet).
I've got "half seeds" spread over safes on several countries. Any single country could get nuked to the ground I'd still be able to get back my coins.
It also makes the "5 USD wrench attack" unsuccesful (in that it's physically impossible to get a seed out of a single safe, even under torture. Sure they could still torture and kill you, but they won't succeed in getting the coins).
That's great, but, it's known that too much paranoia about security becomes a problem. This seems excessively complicated to me. And I mean I understand you, but I cannot recommend to the average dude to do that, especially when right now they don't even understand that they must not write the seed on their computer (or even worse give it to someone on the Internet).
Using a steel plate like the other said yes (it's still relatively easy and is the same thing as I said except you don't use paper), but your technique? Oh boy people would fuck it up and forget what they did.
You just gave me an idea - use Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm to encrypt your key. Split your private key into N pieces (where N is the number of close friends /+ family members you trust) and set k as the number of people you trust won't lose their piece. Then, you need k pieces to recover your key. Even better, encrypt those pieces with AES-256 and set the key to something only YOU know. Even if everyone (>= k) conspires against you, they still need to know the AES key.
Edit: obviously, this presumes writing down your key on a computer, so if you're super paranoid, you could somehow put that algorithm on an Arduino (without a NIC), connect a keyboard, let the Arduino to the computations and use a display to show the result; you then need to manually copy it to a piece of paper/something else.
better to use the thing where you need to write it partially on 3 pieces of paper, and you need 2/3 of the papers to assemble the complete phrase. then store these 3 in separate locations (home, office, and bank deposit box).
And to add to that, I would strongly recommend you protect your seed with a pass phrase, that’s easy for your to remember, but virtually impossible for anyone else to guess. Your pass phrase should not be written down anywhere.
Then if you die nobody can access your coins...
Oh well, this is about security, not about someone accessing your coins if your dead.
He means family.