The original post: /r/cryptocurrency by /u/Frosty-Cone on 2024-05-11 03:38:32.
I’ve been thinking about ways to better secure my seed phrase. Currently, it’s just sitting in a drawer on a piece of paper. This creates issues if the paper is lost or damaged. If someone finds it somehow, they can deduce as to what it is. Sure, I can buy a metal seed plate but some of the same issues exist if it’s lost or compromised in some way. I could use a safe deposit box facility but then I’m trusting that it’ll be secure there and I would need enough in my wallet to justify paying a fee to store it there.
I want to create a way to store my seed phrase so I can access digitally in the cloud while still maintaining security and a level of self custody. I’d create a list of 24 ordered questions that are intimately personal to me. In an excel/sheets workbook, I’d have 24 tabs, each correlating to one word in my seed phrase. In each of these tabs, I’d have a list of the 2048 seed word possibilities. In a seperate column I’d have a corresponding list of 2048 words related to each personal question. But only 1 of those answers would be correct, and that one would correlate to the correct seed word.
Basically, Column 1: 2047 incorrect word/phrases/dates that could be answers to my personal question, plus 1 that is actually the right answer. Column 2: All 2048 seed word possibilities, the correct seed word lines up to the correct answer to my personal question.
Repeated 24 times for each seed word.
Even if someone found my answers workbook, they wouldn’t be able to figure out the correct corresponding words without access to my personal questions. If they had access to my personal questions, they still wouldn’t be able to guess them all as the questions themselves would be specific to me and only I would know the answer to them all.
This solution isn’t perfect, ie I might forget the answers to my personal questions; things that are important and memorable to me now may not be so in 20 years. But it means I can create copies that are equally secure regardless of how many copies I create. Unlike duplicating my seed phrase on multiple pieces of paper which could increase the risk of the phrase being compromised, depending on how it’s stored. It also means I can access my seed phrase digitally from anywhere. If I know the questions well enough, I’d probably be able to deduce the answers myself without access to my personal questions anyway, which nobody else would be able to do.
The main concerns I have are:
- could someone access the answers spreadsheet and somehow access a change log or reverse engineer the spreadsheet to figure out which is the correct answer? I’d obviously combat this by splitting how I enter the answers in the column into groups, making it far harder to work out. But could it still be a probability?
- Forgetting the answers to my questions. I could give certain answers to my friends or family, with no context or access to the answers spreadsheet. Or physically store the answers to the questions elsewhere, meaning someone would need to find both the answers and the answer workbook. If I see the physical answers have been compromised it gives me time to change them or secure/change my workbook.
- A level of trust in the workbook provider is required. This one is probably minimal as I don’t see Microsoft or Google discontinuing their service. But it means if I ever get locked out of my account etc I won’t be able to access the file on the cloud. However it’s easy enough to duplicate and create equally secure offline copies.
Is there anything here that I have not considered? Is this even worth doing or is there a better way of going about securing my seed phrase?
TL;DR - I want to get away from physically storing my seed phrase in a drawer. I want to create a solution whereby I use secret questions personal to me with the correct answers correlating to my seed phrase. These answers would be buried among 2047 other potential answers x24 in a digital workbook. The only way to get the seed phrase would be to know each of the answers.