Encrypting Electrum Seed

[zanza]

Electrum is a nice wallet, one of the best wallet currently available.  Having word seed is very powerful to restore wallet from 13 words and a great Electrum feature that sets it out.

However, this is also a point of weakness, if someone finds your word seed you are very vulnerable.  What about the option to encrypt your 13 word seed? (similar concept to BIP38)  This way, even if someone breaks into your house/safe and takes your code, there will still be a roadblock to getting your Electrum Wallet.

Bonus Points: Making the decryption time have delay gaps (using graphics card or other implementation), so it takes 30 seconds per attempt, or something similar that VeraCrypt/Trezor does


EDIT: Electrum already has an encrypting algorithm (for encrypting private keys).  Could they just have as an option to run the this identical encryption script on the Seed.  So everything is built in already, just applying it to seed (instead of p-keys).  Ideally the encrypted 13 word seed wouldn't even look like a word list, so people wouldn't know its an electrum seed if they found it, or anything Bitcoin related for that matter (so wouldn't even know how/what/why to crack it)

So like a 13 word seed:
Hello this is my thirteen word seed used for electrum wallet ok thanks

would look like this encrypted (or something)
8hjkdf&f doifsd *U( f8df KJHf 78sdyi7y &*7 dh8 l;df;a[ o8f: f;fsd;  h8f

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[OmegaStarScream]

That's an idea that could work indeed .
You just gave me the idea to build simply a custom software to encrypt my Electrum seeds , making something Custom and hard to decrypt is better then use something public even if it's strong hacker will know from where to start unlike custom encryption it could make you earn sometime .

[Quickseller]

Right, if someone were to find where you have written down your seed (or if they are able to find it stored in plaintext on your computer/USB drive/ect), then they will most likely be able to steal your money.

If you are storing your seed digitally, then you can create a text file, copy/paste into the text file, then PGP encrypt that file so only someone with access to your PGP key can decrypt your file. The risk to doing this is that if you lose access to your PGP key, then you will lose access to this backup of your seed, so you will want to keep a backup of your PGP key separate from this backup.

Encrypting a paper copy of your seed is going to be somewhat more complex. You could make some kind of encrypted QR code, however you would be relying on some kind of software to be able to decrypt it in the future.

[zanza]

That's an idea that could work indeed .
You just gave me the idea to build simply a custom software to encrypt my Electrum seeds , making something Custom and hard to decrypt is better then use something public even if it's strong hacker will know from where to start unlike custom encryption it could make you earn sometime .

good idea

I guess the veracrypt/PGP solution is a good one too, however this relies on keeping it the cloud which gives a would be hacker a lot of time/opportunity to work at it before you would know about it.

[jonald_fyookball]

you can hide your seed inside an image as well.

[ColderThanIce]

That's an idea that could work indeed .
You just gave me the idea to build simply a custom software to encrypt my Electrum seeds , making something Custom and hard to decrypt is better then use something public even if it's strong hacker will know from where to start unlike custom encryption it could make you earn sometime .

good idea

I guess the veracrypt/PGP solution is a good one too, however this relies on keeping it the cloud which gives a would be hacker a lot of time/opportunity to work at it before you would know about it.

If your seed is encrypted through PGP, then you should be safe even if a hacker has access to the encrypted file. As long as you don't store an unencrypted copy of your PGP private key in cloud storage along with your encrypted seed, you should be safe for years to come because the encryption PGP uses is so strong.