Step-by-step guide using Vigenère Polyalphabetic Ciphers to encrypt your Mnemonic Seed and prepare it for steganography.

Hi folks,

As of April 2024, the UK police and National Crime Agency were granted new powers to confiscate and destroy cryptocurrency assets, passwords, or hardware wallets without making an arrest:

Police will no longer be required to make an arrest before seizing crypto from a suspect … items that could be used to give information to help an investigation, such as written passwords or memory sticks, can be seized

Whether this will be used to tackle legitimate crime or as an arbitrary blanket procedure to prosecute law-abiding individuals who are concerned about financial privacy is yet to be seen.

What remains is a need for extra precautions to safeguard your Monero.

This is one system that I’ve used and that I want to share with the community.

Thanks

🔗 https://moneromaster.substack.com/p/monero-guide-encrypt-seed

  • rafael_xmrEnglish
    72·
    7 months ago

    Great blog! does this have any benefit over a polyseed mnemonic where you also have a secret password? With polyseed as well as BIP39, even if your mnemonic is caught you can use that plain seed as a decoy that opens a fake wallet, while your real seed with your real funds can only be decrypted with the password, and this encrypted mnemonic by hand won’t result in a valid seed so the malicious actor can assume that a valid seed still exists and it still needs to be seized or brute forced?

    I think this method is better when using steganography combined since the mnemonic looks like a blob of nothing when reading the contents of the file, while if an actual seed was used it could reveal there is a Monero seed hidden in that file, but then I think a better encryption method can be used since using digital files loses the benefit of not using a computer?

    https://github.com/tevador/polyseed

    • MoneroMasterOP
      4·
      7 months ago

      Thanks, glad you found something useful in it.

      I’m not sure, I’ll have to look into polyseed. I guess the over all point is to take elements of this and make it your own :)

      My key focus, as you pointed out, was not to use any third-party software or technology. Trying to think of a “worst case scenario” that provides decent encryption while also only needing a memorisation of a short password and a pen/paper. You could write out the Vigenère Table by hand if you really wanted to.

      Next, in this line of thinking, I’ll do something on the Playfair Code which was used by the British during the Boer War and by German spies during WWII

      • MoneroMasterOP
        21·
        7 months ago

        Yes it is not impervious to brute force-frequency analysis, however it still has it’s uses.