Recover my Bitcoin wallet
So I tested making a secure paper bitcoin key-pair today using some of this information as a starting point. A key-pair contains a public key and a private key which are mathematically linked. I wanted to do this because of a need for high security of the private half of the key pair. If you are really going to move significant value into bitcoin, security of the key-pair is important. Ironically, it seems like paper is one of the most secure ways to prevent the theft of the key. It is possible to physically secure a print out and it takes a lot more work to get to it than just breaking into a computer and stealing a file, which for a hacker seems easy.
A bitcoin key-pair is a way to create an “account” from and to which you can spend and receive bitcoins. The private key is required in order to spend money from the account. The public key is required in order to send money to the account. Generally one wants to keep the private key very secure so that other people can’t spend your bitcoins: like cash that you put in the mail, once you send bitcoin you can’t easily get it back.
A “wallet” contains zero or more key-pairs.
It is also important that you don’t lose your private key. That is considerably easier to manage as you can simply create several paper copies and distribute them in diverse secure locations.
To create a key-pair which is secure against theft and in particular spyware I did the following:
- I used VirtualBox for Mac and created a new virtual machine on my computer that was not connected to the Internet.
- I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on it from an .iso image.
- I downloaded a copy of bitaddress.org, a client-side bitcoin key-pair generator onto a thumb drive
- I mounted the thumb drive in the virtual machine
- I opened the offline copy of bitaddress in the virtual machine
- I generated a key-pair in a browser
- I printed it to a .pdf on the thumb drive
- I mounted the thumb drive on the host Mac and printed out the paper wallet.
- Then I used the “shred” utility to destroy the pdf file.
