Trezor Crypto Cold Storage Wallet Releases Shamir Backups To Reduce Risk Of Losing Recovery Seeds

Hardware wallets are the most preferred and safest way to store bitcoins. The main reason being that private keys are secured in this device. It is not an easy job to hack these keys remotely, as they are not exposed to the internet. Removing the keys is difficult even if you can physically access the device.

The assumption that the private keys are safe from any harm could be untrue when it comes to the physicality of the device. It could be lost, stolen, or for other reasons become useless. It is very important to keep a backup seed in case any of this happens.

What Is a Backup Seed?

It refers to a list of words jotted down on a piece of paper whereby you can generate the private keys. What happens when this piece of paper is lost or stolen?

A More Secure way to Split Backup Seeds

A hardware wallet is only secure if its backup seed is secured. If the backup seed gets lost, it will be of no help when the hardware is lost, stolen, or unusable. In case the hardware is stolen, the thief can easily claim the coins in the hardware wallet. The two cases could make the coins forever inaccessible.

After a year of development, the company behind Trezor hardware wallets came up with Shamir’s backup. The cryptographer Adi Shamir created a cryptographic algorithm known as Shamir’s secret sharing. This backup allows users to split the backup seeds into several lists of words known as shares. Shamir backup allows users to create up to 16 shares that can be divided further into sub shares.

The private keys can be recovered by combining sets of prearranged shares. For example, you could set up three out of four back-ups. You come up with four different word lists and you need any three of the four to restore the private keys. If any of the shares get lost, the remaining ones can be used.

Wrapping up!

Shamir backups are available for the latest model- SatoshiLabs Trezor Model T. Other wallet providers could follow this Company’s footsteps, all the same, to offer Shamir’s backups to their users.