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
i like the intention, but simple encryption is not going to cut it, you need to be able to deny the existance of the encrypted volume: https://blog.nihilism.network/servers/encryption/index.html what you’re looking for is plausible deniability. in short, hide your mnemonic seed into a veracrypt hidden volume
@nihilist @MoneroMaster
If you are forced to decrypt a veracrypt volume on your siezed computer, the very fact that you are using veracrypt is probably enough for law enforcement to presume the existence of a hidden volume.
You can deny it, sure, but it’s definitely no longer plausible.
how is it no longer plausible ? pls let me know who managed to prove the existance of a hidden volume and how, as up until now i didnt find anyone that managed to. If there is no proof that the hidden volume exists, you can keep claiming that there is no hidden volume.
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Hi Nihilist, I recently saw your Haveno demo on Monero Talk, good job! Thanks for contributing helpful resources to the community, we need more of this.
One thing I try to keep in mind is that if we get to a stage where governments are holding citizens in embassies without pressing charges for decades, arresting developers for “conspiracy” to commit crimes, etc. then plausible deniability is not really applicable anymore. Plausible deniability assumes courts are seeking justice instead of following orders.
I’ve recently been studying the GULAG system of the USSR and it’s amazing how everyone knew that their mock trials were a show and that the vast majority of people in the forced labor camps were innocent. The good news is that these types of systems can never endure any significant longevity. Compare the length and legacy of the USSR to the Roman Empire and it’s a laughable comparison.
That being said, your suggestion for a decoy is a good system to implement for added security indeed. Thanks for sharing Veracrypt, I was not aware of this particular encryption method. I’ll need to compile a list of other encryption systems for people to investigate if they want something more complex/robust as I’ve received a lot of feedback about this.
It might also be worth considering creating a dummy seed that is kept in a safe, so if a thief was to break in and access it you would have misdirected them from your true seed hidden in another location.
yea thats the point of having a decoy volume, you claim that the hidden one doesnt exist and that you gave the password. it remains possible until the adversary is able to prove that the hidden volume exists.