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On official site they (Trezor) emphasize that you should never store your recovery seed digitally. But this seems to me absolutely strange. First of all we live in 21st century. And paper (or even steel) backup is easy to lose and you cannot easily password-protect them.

So I was thinking about using a separate keepass database that is stored on multiple devices and clouds, BUT is decrypted only in safe environment. For safe environment I choose live Tails system. I believe such approach is good because:

  1. Much harder to loose my seed

  2. Much easier to store

  3. Still cannot be hacked, decrypted not by me, keyloggers won't work
  4. This db is supposed to be used only in emergency case, so it is feasible to spend like 30-60 minutes just to recover my seed, because it won't happen often

The only risk is to forget encryption password since I am not going to use it often - so I will create some schedule to recall & check it like once a week.

Are there any drawbacks I don't see?

Yurii
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    *Schedule to recall & check...* This is great... I lost the password of a 1yr old ETH wallet :( – Azteca May 17 '17 at 22:12
  • How is your solution working out for you so far? Looking to do the same. Is there something specific you use to recall and check the password? – Rynardt Oct 11 '17 at 21:32
  • @Rynardt recall is relatively easy given that I just use a really long passphrase what is easy memorizable for me. And sometimes I just go, boot live Tails and actually try to open my high-security db, so that if I fail to do that I can take actions to save my money into another wallet – Yurii Oct 12 '17 at 09:40
  • i don't think paper is better, however I would keep it in an offline system and/or some offline medias. I know people encrypting it with pgp with yubikey and having it in the cloud encrypted, sounds ok for me. – VP. Nov 07 '17 at 07:12

2 Answers2

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There are other risks, for example your hardware may be compromised. Purism attempts to mitigate the vulnerabilities popping up in intel chips as just one example, but do they succeed? Hard to say, intel chips are not open hardware. The idea of chips that can be remotely exploited when your computer is 'turned off' is kinda scary, but I'd caution this is only one example. https://puri.sm/learn/avoiding-intel-amt/

One thing hardware wallets attempt to do is to mitigate risk of malicious hardware (other than the wallet itself of course), so just be aware that trusting your key to other hardware extends your trust also to that other feature rich, and thus target rich software AND hardware stack. Whether that risk is ok or not is of course a judgement call.

There is another approach I've been tempted by, but BIP 39's use of SHA-256 for a checksum gets in the way. I'll ask Trezor if they could add optional hex bypass (sans checksum) to BIP 39 during recovery, for advanced users. http://ben.mord.io/2017/11/paper-pencil-seed-generation-from.html

Benjamin Mord
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I personally use a KeePass Database and decrypt it only inside a linux VM.

A good strong password is always recommended, and you can add multi-factor authentication to a KeePass database, using some of the plugins found on the site under the category Cryptography & Key Providers.

For example you could use a Certificate to encrypt the database alongside the password, and if you are a little paranoid, also have an OTP verification together (3-factor authentication), by using the right plugins.

noctrex
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