Bitcoin Forum

Not sure if this has been raised before, I cant see it anywhere.  But what if you could use one of your personal photos as a seed for your private key?

Photos contain a lot of info, and are unique and random.

I would not. Nobody's getting my biometrics willingly.

I mean, it could be a snap of your dog or what ever.  The idea is that no one will have that exact photo but you.   Easy to remember.

And the bot to download, hash, addressify and check every image on the internet launches in 3...2...

You'd need very advanced photo recognition, and it could only be used to verify your identity, not to generate a key from scratch, because no two photos of you would be exactly the same on a byte level.  A fingerprint scanner would be easier.

Impossible to remember in your brain. You can store it in a non-volatile memory, but then why not just keep it simple and generate a random number and use it as private key and store it in a nonvolatile memory... yes... now, that's a thought! You might even encrypt it before storing it, and remember the passphrase!
Also, what kjj said.

That's my point.  Wouldn't be image recognition, the software would iterate through the pixels to pull out specific values as keys.

Ill knock up some pseudo code to explain.

it could work well in conjunction with a smaller password that you memorized. the picture would add security that a smaller password alone couldnt offer and the password would prevent people from simply testing all of your pictures to see if any was a private key. and of course there are advantages to not having to remember such a long password.

Or you could choose 2 photos.  Overlay one on the other.  every image on the net * ever image on the net = big number

Yes exactly.

Hm...Biocryptography?

Public key + fingerprint/private key = send transaction?  All someone has to do is cut off your fingers...

Any file, like photo, music, video, could be the seed. However, you will lose the private key even with 1 bit of data loss.

Or you can do it the other way around and hide the private key inside the picture using steganography.

No Problem.

1. SHA256 hash your photo --> 27d45bd2b3cc80481629522c9de1409121f75e08c3ad65bce1eb88a7a54cd705

2. bitaddress.org --> Wallet details --> enter sha256 hash  --> Private key: 5J7pyQRYWxAhYg4tC1BMVDhT15GFxcRYahz2m71DAG1UR11tit8

address: 1PQa3MbPhPezjz8SkY4TdMxAupkUX2s215

Which is also true of storing any private key electronically (such as in your wallet/client) as well.

Yes. But since a private key takes only 256bit, while a photo may take several Mbits, a private key has lower chance of getting corrupted.

You can hash anything, a photo is just another stream of bits.  It would be like keeping your private key in an unencrypted ascii file, it's just more obscured.

It doesn't have to be unencrypted.  You could use HMAC-SHA1 on the {image file,password} pair.

Like

Use parity on your photo or file. Or 7zip / RAR it with recovery 10% record.

It's a lot easier to just generate a random private key using bitaddress or vanitygen and just save that in a text file. Then you zip or rar it and copy it to several places like in a floppy, usb flash drive, SD card and printed on paper, stored in an envelope, locked in your safe or vault.

If you really want to use a photo, take a picture of the sky, or someone said take a picture of complete darkness (cover the lens) while setting the ISO to maximum, to get noise from the CCD or sensor. Export the RAW file or the highest quality jpeg, depending on your camera model.

Best idea itt