KEXP ๐ถ #NowPlaying Bot๐บ๐ฆ #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #VarietyMix
Shamir:
๐ต I Love My Friends
I Love my Friends, by Shamir
from the album Ten
Shamir
hubertbonscepQuestion for you #pkm commu:
I'm wondering How do you handle long-term storage of critical secrets? Especially curious about approaches that survive both digital and physical threats over decades.
What threat models am I missing for personal cold storage scenarios?
๐งต Thread: Building information-theoretic security for personal cold storage
After almost losing access to critical crypto wallets during a team transition, I've been thinking about the cold storage problem differently.
Most people store seeds/keys in single locations: hardware wallets, encrypted files, safety deposit boxes. But what happens when that ONE thing fails, gets stolen, or you forget where you put it?
1/8
๐ The solution we ended up building uses Shamir's Secret Sharing - the same math that Trezor uses internally, but applied to any secret you need to store long-term.
Split your seed phrase into 5 pieces, need any 3 to recover. The beautiful part: 2 pieces reveal ZERO information. Information-theoretic security, not just "computationally hard."
2/8
๐ก Real-world threat models this addresses:
๐ฅ House fire (shares elsewhere survive)
๐ช Inheritance planning (family can pool shares)
๐ Forgotten hiding spots (only need threshold)
โ๏ธ Physical coercion (attacker needs multiple locations)
๐พ Hardware failure (recover to any new device)
3/8
๐ก๏ธ The crypto nerd in me loves that this is provably secure:
- AES-256-GCM for file encryption
- Shamir's algorithm over GF(256)
- Each share is self-contained with recovery tools
- Air-gapped operation (Docker --network=none)
- No proprietary crypto, everything auditable
4/8
๐ฏ Use cases beyond crypto:
- Password manager master vault exports
- GPG/SSH keys you can't afford to lose
- Encrypted family photos/documents
- Any "nuclear option" secret that needs decades of survival
The key insight: some secrets are too important for single points of failure.
5/8
๐ Why we open-sourced it:
When your financial security depends on a tool, you can't trust it to any company's business model. Cryptographic tools for long-term storage need to be:
- Transparent (audit the math)
- Immortal (survive any vendor)
- Community-maintained
6/8
๐ป Implementation details for the security-minded:
- Runs completely offline
- Cross-platform (Linux/macOS/Windows)
- Each share includes full recovery application
- FIPS 140-2 compatible algorithms
Reproducible builds
GitHub: https://github.com/katvio/fractum
7/8
Question for #infosec community:
I'm wondering How do you handle long-term storage of critical secrets? Especially curious about approaches that survive both digital and physical threats over decades.
What threat models am I missing for personal cold storage scenarios?
GitHub - katvio/fractum: Fractum is a portable secure file encryption tool allowing you to encrypt files and split them into multiple shares, with the ability to decrypt using only a subset of these shares.
Fractum is a portable secure file encryption tool allowing you to encrypt files and split them into multiple shares, with the ability to decrypt using only a subset of these shares. - katvio/fractum
BBC6Music ๐ถ #NowPlaying Bot๐บ๐ฆ #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #LoudAndProud
Shamir:
๐ต I Love My Friends
I Love my Friends, by Shamir
from the album Ten
๐บ๐ฆ #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Shamir:
๐ต Head in the Clouds
https://open.spotify.com/track/4PiXipqSBXVRRhRxPs2kv3
๐ถ show playlist ๐
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Ivj2i9BbyMoJmb0ZucUM2
๐ถ KEXP playlist ๐
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VNALrOa3gWbk794YuIrwg
IncognitimLegend. #shamir #cryptography
"My personal opinion is that the world would have been better without cryptocurrencies,"
"Everything is highly centralized in a small number of very large exchanges. No one is using it in order to make payments; people are using it once in order to speculate,"
"Cryptocurrencies are what enabled all the malware. It would have been very difficult to extract so much money from companies if there were no cryptocurrencies."
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/crypto_pioneers/
"My personal opinion is that the world would have been better without cryptocurrencies,"
"Everything is highly centralized in a small number of very large exchanges. No one is using it in order to make payments; people are using it once in order to speculate,"
"Cryptocurrencies are what enabled all the malware. It would have been very difficult to extract so much money from companies if there were no cryptocurrencies."
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/crypto_pioneers/
Martin Rass#ADL just defended #Musk - no surprise but another sign that their socalled fighting #antisemitism is only #zionist #propaganda and #opportunism - take a look at this instructive #documentary from Yoav #Shamir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAjc1OSrmY
Defamation
๐ง
๐ #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #VarietyMix
Shamir:
๐ต On the Regular