If I want to send a seed to someone. How would you do it securely? Is it maybe even possible through the tangle? For example I have a seed with 50Miota and I want to give it away to a friend who lives 200km away. How would you do it? And also in the machine economy it could be necessary that one person or a machine tells another machine its new seed. Maybe because the owner of the company has changed.
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The merits of sending seeds aside, how do you send anything securely? The seed is a string you want to securely send. That doesn't sound like something that hasn't been done a million times. What possibilities are you considering?– HelmarCommented Dec 12, 2017 at 22:41
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3 Answers
Never send your seed over the network, just explain to your friend how to generate it's own seed securely offline. Ask him one address and transfer the iotas.
Securing transfer is one of the main purpose of the iota network. It would be a very bad signal (from an educational perspective) to send him a seed over the internet (or even by any other way).
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I think explaining of security issues can be done later. In first step I only want to make it as easy as possible for someone new. And it is much easier to just tell him download the App log in with this seed I did sent to you (maybe via whats app) and send me some Iotas back just for fun. I don't like to explain the whole story in first step...– VromCommented Dec 12, 2017 at 10:22
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1I understand, but dealing with crypto-currencies in general requires to understand the risks: that should be the "first step". Uneducated users is a major threat for the whole crypto-currency eco-system. (because after loosing all their money: they will claim all over the place that a system isn't secure while in fact they didn't follow basic security recommendations)– ben75Commented Dec 12, 2017 at 10:35
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1If you really want to stay with just sending a seed, you could use a messenger with end-to-end encryption like "signal". But it's also not 100% secure. Commented Dec 12, 2017 at 10:46
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I prefer learning by doing and with IOTA it is possible to send 0.00001$. So I think there is too much security panic in the cryptospace... Just start with small amounts and spread awareness and if the person likes it you can explain him the details. If I start with please download keypass... my parents and many other people would run away and never understand how easy it is to use the tangle...– VromCommented Dec 12, 2017 at 10:49
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It's not "too much security panic" if that person thinks that sending a seed is fine and continues to do it with more and more resources. A person should always know the risk--not ignorant to it until it matters, by then it is too late.– GenxthisCommented Dec 13, 2017 at 7:03
The Problem with sending a seed using encrypted messaging over the Internet is that you can never know if someone is remotely viewing what you are reading on your computer after the message has been decrypted, or if your device is infected with a key logger that reports your keystrokes over the Internet or buy some side channel such as a flashing LED.
I have made the this open source airgapped device to address that issue.
This video shows how it is used for encrypted messaging.
It was made to address the possibility that the components used to make our devices have been compromised before we have even purchased them and yet still we need to use our devices to write send and read private messages securely.
ben75 has the best answer but still there may be times when you must send a seed such as when you are providing for a child's future with IOTA and neither the child nor the parents have any idea yet what IOTA is. Paper may be your best bet in that case because there is more chance that the recipients will loose the seed simply because they do not understand the encryption process.
This video shows that sharing private keys (not seeds) is required to facilitate multi-signature transactions. In that case I would recommend GPG encrypted messaging where the private key is not decrypted for use until it is safely behind an airgap where remote viewing is not possible without extreme efforts by highly sophisticated criminals or by the most well equipped and determined government agencies.
Ideally you would want to send it to them in a purely untraceable way. A few options:
1) Paper. Do it in real life on a piece of paper.
2) End to end encrypted messaging. Use a secure messenger, and burn the messages later.
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I think another good idea is to only send a seed of a smaler amount of digits and tell him to add one word in front and one word in the end. So that in total he has a Seed of 81 digits. In that way I could also send a piece of paper with only 70 digts as a barcode on it. Than it is easier for him to insert the correct seed in the wallet I guess while copy and paste it from a barcode scanner. And if someone finds the paper he will not find– VromCommented Dec 21, 2017 at 18:42
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Never send a seed to somebody. Even not as a gift card or something. Just ask for an address and send the funds to this address. It is like with your bank account. You also don't create a new bank account for your parents and say: Here is the password to the bank account. You simply ask for the number to transfer the funds to this account. Commented Mar 17, 2019 at 1:57