What is Shamir backup? A shield against theft and loss
Imagine this. You have a cherished family secret recipe for an exquisite sauce that’s been passed down for generations. It’s priceless and crucial to protect. (Precious like your recovery seed, which helps in safeguarding your coins and tokens).
Typically, your family has written down the ingredients and instructions for this secret sauce on a sheet of paper. If this paper gets lost, destroyed, or falls into the wrong hands, the unique flavor could be lost forever or replicated by others without your consent.
So, what’s the way out? In comes — Shamir backup.
🤔 How, you ask?
The Shamir backup involves deconstructing your secret sauce recipe into individual components.
- Each ingredient and step is written on separate cards.
- You, then, distribute these cards among trusted family members. Let’s call this the process of “recovery shares”.
- To whip up a batch of the sauce, a certain number of these ingredient cards (the threshold) must be brought together.
- Some relatives are entrusted with more cards than others, depending on how much you trust them and how essential they are to the recipe-making process.
Now, if one relative accidentally loses their card, or an outsider comes across just one of these cards, they won’t have enough information to recreate your secret sauce, because they don’t possess the complete recipe. As long as the number of lost cards is below the threshold, your family’s culinary secret remains safe.
Furthermore, if you’re eager to prepare the sauce for a family gathering, and some members are not around, you can still make it, as long as you can collect enough cards to meet the predetermined threshold.
Through the Shamir backup method, your family’s secret sauce recipe is safeguarded against a single point of failure. It also provides the flexibility to continue the tradition of making your legendary sauce even if some pieces of the recipe are temporarily unavailable, provided the threshold number of components is still accessible.
🛡 ️Shamir backup and its role in protecting your recovery seed
In the case of hardware wallets, and recovery seed protection, Shamir backup allows users to split their wallet’s private key into multiple unique recovery shares.
Note: Shamir backup is available on the Trezor Model T and Trezor Safe 3
- When setting up a new wallet with Shamir backup, your Trezor device will prompt you to generate a certain number of recovery shares.
- You can create up to 16 shares, each consisting of a sequence of 20 or 33 words.
- After generation, you must decide on a threshold — the minimum number of shares needed to recover your wallet.
(Another) Note: The threshold is a crucial component of the Shamir backup strategy. It determines how many shares you need to reconstruct your wallet. For instance, setting the threshold to “2/3” will require any two out of the three total shares required for recovery.
🪜 Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Shamir backup
In conclusion
Shamir Backup offers several advantages over the traditional single-seed backup. Some of these include,
- Instead of a single recovery seed, you can have up to 16 shares.
- No single share contains enough information to compromise your hardware wallet.
- Shares can be distributed among trusted parties or secure locations.
- The threshold allows for some shares to be lost without compromising wallet recovery.
Curious about Shamir backup in protecting your recovery seed? Here is another resource from our knowledge base that delves deeper into the topic,
