Bitcoin Forum

Paper wallets are arguably more secure than other methods of storing your private keys. Paper wallets alone are vulnerable to physical theft. When discussing secure methods of storing bitcoins, I have always recommended using an Encrypted Paper Wallet. This post seeks to instruct interested community members in creating a Encrypted Paper Wallet.

Before I begin with the guide, I am going to list some of my criteria:

• The Encryption/Decryption method must be strong.
• The Encryption/Decryption method must be platform independent.
• The Encryption/Decryption method must be open source.
• The Encryption/Decryption method must be client sided and capable of functioning without the internet.

Finding an encryption/decryption method that matched all the above criteria was not easy. At one point I was using Notepad++ with nppcrypt, but that solution fails due to it's Windoze only limitation. After much searching, I found pidCrypt (https://www.pidder.de/pidcrypt/), which meets all the criteria.

The Guide:
Prerequisites:

• Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/download/index.html)
• A QR Code Generator, I used this (http://sourceforge.net/projects/qrgenerator/files/).
• A bitcoin private key that you wish to safely store.
• A brain.

Steps:
1. Download this (http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=48kdXQ07), and this (http://ni.0a0.in/pfiles/12649/EncryptedBitcoinCardTemplate.odt).
- FILE1: A standalone/offline AES-CBC pidCrypt implementation (https://www.pidder.de/pidcrypt/?page=demo_aes-cbc).
- FILE2: A template to create encrypted bitcoin paper wallets in the size of credit cards.
2. Encrypt your private key using the first file from step one and a cryptographically strong password(30+ characters with no dictionary words.)
- ADVICE: I would do this step offline. I've not had a chance to look through all of pidCrypt's code.
3. Take the result from step 2 and create a QR Code for it.
4. Open file 2 from step 1 in open office writer.
5. Drag the QR Code from step 3 to the top-left side of the box in the open office writer template from step 1.
6. Paste the output from step 2 on the top-right side of the box in the open office writer template from step 1.
7. Print.
Congratulations if you managed to follow all the above steps you should have an encrypted credit card sized bitcoin paper wallet.

Here (http://ni.0a0.in/pfiles/12650/EncryptedBitcoinCardExample.pdf) is an example of the end result.
I'm certain others could make this prettier and easier.

If the links break, let me know and suggest some better no registration file hosts.

Hope this guide/My work are useful to somebody out there.
If not, all good, most of this I did primarily for myself anyhow.