KeepMySeed

Safe Storage of Passwords, Private Keys, and Other Important Information

Everyone who reads these lines has many his/her own accounts on the Internet, such as online banking, social networks, e-mail, private keys, seed phrases needed to recover Bitcoin funds on-chain, etc. … Many things in our world depend on the safe storage of this data. And many people make a mistake and store all their passwords and other sensitive data in regular files on their devices. All the devices are network-connected, and thus, they are subject to cyber threats, such as Trojans, viruses, hacker attacks, etc. One of these fine days, you can be left without access to your e-mail address to which almost all your accounts are attached. And having lost access to your e-mail, you automatically lose access to many of your accounts linked to your e-mail. After all, an attacker will have no trouble changing the passwords from your accounts using your e-mail. What does this threaten? The attacker will see all your personal correspondence from social networks. And if there is information compromising you, you can be subject to extortion and surrender. Online banking is also vulnerable, and even two-factor authentication via SMS is not a sovereign remedy at the present time. There are so many ways to bypass this protection in 2020. In other words, you can lose all your money. But currently, attackers show a special interest in cryptocurrency wallets. After all, having gained access to such a wallet, they can transfer all funds to their addresses with impunity and without special schemes to hide traces, as against ordinary bank accounts.

Our KeepMySeed team thought about methods for safe storage of sensitive data for a very long time and came up with an interesting idea: We offer you to store important data in NFC tags.

What are NFC tags?

NFC tags are passive devices that operate without power supply; they must fall within a certain range for activation. The tags cannot transfer data by themselves; instead, they are simply used to transfer information to an “active” device – to a Smartphone, for example.

Why did we decide on this particular method?

1. An NFC tag is not connected to the Internet. And this means that it is not subject to such threats as the penetration of a trojan or other hacker attack.

2. NFC tags have a low cost. The simplest NFC tag in the form of a sticker costs from 10 rubles. It is sold in almost every city. You can record the most important data on such a label and stick it, for example, under the cover of your passport. As we know, most adequate people hide their passports in a safe place. Hence, your passwords will be in safekeeping.

3. It is easy to work with NFC tags. Currently, most Smartphones have the ability to record and read NFC tags.

How does it work?

First of all, you should install the application on your Smartphone and run it. Then bring the Smartphone to the NFC tag. A dialog box appears in which you should enter your sensitive data. Also, when recording, you can specify “Encrypt Data”. In this case, the program will propose you to enter a password for the data encryption. And the data will be encrypted using the AES – this is the safest data storage method. All your sensitive data in the tag will be encrypted. And even if an attacker takes possession of your tag, he/she can only read disorganized data. In order to obtain ordered data from this data chaos, the attacker will have to enter the password key for decryption, which you created when recording the tag.

As a result, we have the following: You need to create and remember only one password key. This password key will be used to encrypt and decrypt your data in the NFC tag. This is much easier than remembering dozens of logins and passwords.

NFC tags come in a wide variety of types and form factors, more details can be found here - https://link.medium.com/QeUyCIN7W2

This application is open source. And available for audit. https://github.com/KeepMySeed/NFC