Introducing BitKey - A secure Bitcoin live USB/CD solution built with TKLDev | TurnKey GNU/Linux
You are here
Category: All
Introducing BitKey - A secure Bitcoin live USB/CD solution built with TKLDev
Blog Tags:
desktop
tkldev
bitcoin
bitkey
Introducing BitKey - A secure Bitcoin live USB/CD solution built with TKLDev
Alon Swartz
- Wed, 2014/07/16 - 08:00 -
5 comments
I'd like to announce a side project we've been working called
BitKey
. The idea was to see if we could use the TurnKey development tools to create a self-contained read-only CD/USB stick with everything you need to perform highly secure air-gapped Bitcoin transactions.
Background
Liraz and I usually have our hands full developing TurnKey, but we've been super enthusiastic fans of
Bitcoin
from early on. After going to our first local Bitcoin meetup we discovered the elephant in the room was that there was no easy way to perform Bitcoin transactions with adequate security and by that I mean that your wallet's private keys live on an air-gapped system physically disconnected from the Internet.
People who didn't know enough to be paranoid were making themselves easy targets to Bitcoin stealing malware, browser man-in-the-middle attacks and a whole zoo of attacks that were old school a decade ago, while the more cautious, security-minded folks seemed to be reinventing the wheel and coming up with various cruel and unusual ad-hoc solutions such as booting from a Live Ubuntu CD offline and pointing their browser at a copy of bitaddress to create a simple paper wallet.
We realized we could come up with something better, that we would want to use ourselves, and that others might be interested in as well.
How does BitKey relate to TurnKey?
Well, it does and it doesn't. Necessity is the mother of invention and BitKey started out life as just another itch which we happened to have the means (
TKLDev
) of scratching. Since it doesn't fit the mold we're not sure yet whether it makes sense for this to be an official part of TurnKey or its own thing.
For now, BitKey is a side project that leverages TurnKey's open source build infrastructure - but we thought that its existence and its usage of TKLDev might make for an interesting post.
The project has its own website:
bitkey.io
. You can find the source on
GitHub
. Check it out and tell us what you think.
Update Jul 22 2014
: A discussion on Reddit prompted me to write a blog post explaining how to use BitKey to perform secure Bitcoin transactions without needing to trust BitKey not to be compromised:
The closest you can get to perfectly secure Bitcoin transactions (without doing them in your head)
Comments
Thanks for sharing this, I'll throw in my 2cents
Liraz Siri
- Tue, 2014/07/22 - 17:35
Thanks for getting the reddit discussion going. I'm posting my comments there now.
reply
I posted responses on Reddit and on the blog
Liraz Siri
- Tue, 2014/07/22 - 21:10
I went the extra mile and created a blog post explaining how you can use BitKey to create secure Bitcoin transactions without having to assume BitKey can be trusted:
The closest you can get to perfectly secure Bitcoin transactions (without doing them in your head)
reply
Yes USBs can die
Jeremy Davis
- Thu, 2017/11/23 - 23:13
Yes USBs can die, so having a backup is a really good idea. TBH, I'm not closely involved with the BitKey development so I'm not totally up to speed, but I do know that some have been working on including printer drivers so that users can print out a paper wallet as a backup.
But yes you can just "clone" the USB stick. I'm a Linux commandline user so I'd just use dd to copy from one USB to another, and/or to a file. Mac OSX has dd too I think? If you are on Windows, I just did a quick google and found a
SuperUser Q&A
which has some good sounds suggestions. I recall using
Rufus
years ago (when I was a Windows user) and it was quite good. According to one of the answers, you can choose 'DD Image' for 'Create bootable disk using' [your USB].
reply
Pages
Add new comment
Apps
Specials
Web development
Framework
Stack
IT Infrastructure
Content management
Blogging
Ecommerce
Education
Wiki
Media
Business management
CRM
ERP
Invoicing
Messaging
Email
Forum
Chat
Issue tracking
Project management
Database
NoSQL
Developer tools
Help
Forums
Support
General
Development
Documentation
Security and News Announcements
Low-traffic newsletter: up to one email a month.
Previous issues
Categories
development
news
appliances
community
debian
release
hub
stable
iso
security
cloud
ec2
aws
proxmox
lxc
ubuntu
tkldev
tips
v16.x
drupal
More tags
Recent posts
Free up disk space
4th Aug, 2024
Python PEP 668 - working with "externally managed environment"
29th Jul, 2024
v18.0 Stable Release #6 - 10 Newly Updated ISOs, Hub Builds & Proxmox/LXC builds
17th Apr, 2024
v18.0 Stable Release #5 - 20 Updated ISOs & Hub Builds - Proxmox/LXC builds
12th Feb, 2024
v18.0 Stable Release #4 - 10 Updated ISOs & Hub Builds - Proxmox/LXC builds
5th Feb, 2024
1 of 63
next ›
Archive
August 2024
(1)
July 2024
(1)
April 2024
(1)
February 2024
(2)
November 2023
(1)
October 2023
(1)
September 2023
(1)
July 2023
(1)
April 2023
(1)
March 2023
(1)
December 2022
(1)
November 2022
(2)
Pages
Recent comments
V19?
TurnKey LXC templates are available via the Proxmox UI
Non-Aws platforms
Thanks for that!
the command for adding the
mtoolshub
Great post
randomness