Bitcoin Forum

Hello BitCoin community,

Im a newcomer to bitcoin having just set up my first mining rig a few days ago, and it truly saddens me to see people having their hard-earned bitcoins stolen from them. I have a suggestion to the developers (but cannot post it anywhere but here) to try and prevent theft in the future. I propose the developers include a thin version of truecrypt or some other open source encryption software to automatically create an encrypted container with a user-set password and/or random private key when the bitcoin client is first installed on a machine. This container could be tiny and simply hold the users wallet file. This way, even backup copies are encrypted from the very beginning without users having to manually take action to secure their coins.

Unfortunatley, with the current system, there could be many people investing their hard earned money into bitcoin without the knowledge of free programs such as truecrypt or the knowledge of how to operate these programs. Automating the procedure for them could definatley help. On average, people will never secure their computers from viruses/trojans etc fully, so encrypting a wallet file is a simple way to add an extra layer of security to peoples investment.

Unless a user is keylogged and/or their password stolen, by the time a persons wallet file could be decrypted via bruteforce it would be rendered invalid by the network.

Just an idea for the developers. Im not much of a programmer yet but I might try nd make a little script to automate this at some point.

Regards,
Abaddon

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet#Making_a_secure_workspace

This is already set for the next major release.