Topic: AirGap wallet- Self custody made simple and secure - Protect your crypto offline - page 2. (Read 2646 times)

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uUSD is a stable coin issued on the Tezos blockchain. YOU can learn more here: Youves
Bitcoin and other altcoins are possible. I will forward this suggestion to our devs.



Thanks. I added an extra link to the post.

$25 is a good price for two metal seed plates especially if they pass all the durability testing with flying colors. Free shipping worldwide is a highly commendable option you have given your customers. I am not sure about the t-shirts though. I don't see a big market for that.

Your shop accepts payments via credit cards and a stablecoin I have never heard of called uUSD. Do you have any plans to support bitcoin or some of the more popular altcoins? PayPal would also be a good option for those not comfortable entering their credit card details in a random website.

On a different note, the link in your post doesn't take us to the shop. It takes us to your Twitter page announcing the shop, and from there we get the link to the shop. Maybe it would be better if the link took us to the AirGap shop directly.

This is is great price for two stainless steel plates and engraving pen in starter kit, but I am interested to see how durable would engraving hold compared to all other stainless steal plates.
I would support suggestion from SFR10 and you should really send your plates to Jameson Lopp who is testing them all the time, and maybe he finds some weak spots.
My favorite backup solution is stainless steal washers that are cheap and durable, but I think AirGap Recovery Plate can easily compete with competition.

The starter kit comes at a very attractive price, but if I were you, I would've sent a sample to "Jameson Lopp" for performing various stress tests and publishing the results ^{[might come in handy in attracting customers]}: Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Reviews

Yes I can, and I wrote more about it one of my topics called Multisig VS Shamir Secret Sharing, so I don't want to repeat myself.
You can clearly see the pros and cons for both of them, and I provided links for reference, but I also listened to comments of some crypto security experts about this subject.

OK good to hear, maybe you should write more about it when it's ready.
There is general lack of mobile wallets that support multisig, and I constantly see people are asking for this.
Can you post link or screenshot for AirGap roadmap?

Could you elaborate on the clear disadvantages of Shamir's Secret Sharing? The only downside I see is the complexity of the implementation, which leaves room for error and can decrease security if not implemented right. For this reason, we will also add other schemes like SeedXOR and Hamming Backups, which are much simpler and leave less room for error.

In my personal opinion, the reason that SLIP39 did not get a lot of traction was because it is not compatible with BIP39. What I mean by this is that it's not possible to take a BIP39 mnemonic, then split it up into SLIP39 shares and get back your BIP39 mnemonic (=> no "roundtrips" are possible). SSKR is compatible with BIP39 mnemonics. From a wallet developer perspective, adding SLIP39 is more work because it often isn't compatible with the existing architecture of the app. But SSKR can basically just be added as a small add-on, then once the BIP39 mnemonic is recovered, the app can be used as usual. But I guess only time will tell what happens around adoption of those standards.


Multisig has advantages over Shamirs', the most important is that there is no one "single point of failure", because the keys can be distributed while signing. The one important downside in this context is that multisig isn't chain agnostic. Bitcoin supports multisig "natively", but for most other chains, smart contracts have to be used for multisig. So it's not possible to have a generic multisig implementation, but it is possible with Shamirs' because it works on a mnemonic level.

AirGap Vault does support multisig because it supports signing PSBTs. To do this, you'll have to use it with a watch-only wallet like Sparrow, Specter or BlueWallet. Please note that we didn't officially announce the support for multisig just yet, because we would like to add some additional functionality to make it more secure (eg. being able to register co-signers in the Vault to verify change addresses, which currently can't be done). This is on our roadmap and will hopefully come sometime in Q1.

Trezor and some other wallets are using Secret Shamir Sharing for years but I don't see general acceptance from community like it happened with their BIP39 proposal.
I doubt this is going to popular with one universal standard, because there are clear flaws in this concept, so it's more likely we are going to see something totally new instead.

I prefer multisig setup, so my question is does Airgap wallet support multisig setup and can it be combined with Electrum and other hardware wallets for this?

Lack of clear standards was indeed a problem. But the new SSKR standard is here to solve that. While it's currently not widely used, there are multiple implementations available in case one project shuts down. And adoption will probably improve over time (it's a very new standard).

The use cases for passphrases and Shamir's are very different. But even if you could somehow "replicate" some kind of social recovery feature by using passphrases, that wouldn't be a standard either, and you then have to make sure you remember how to recover it.

And you have to differentiate between not being able to recover your seed in case a project ceases to exist, and having to put some effort into recovering your seed. Our code is open source, so you will always be able to recover it, it's just not as easy as downloading a different app.

But as I said, we do want to build on standards, and now that there is one (SSKR), we'll add support for it in the near future.

I didn't mean disappear with your money and take it from the users. They said that their scheme and implementation isn't compatible with anything else. So if you set up a social recovery option on AirGap, Airgap is the only software that works with that system. Electrum is open-source, but you can no longer connect old versions to Electrum servers. It's for your own security, but I am just making a point.

My question is what is going to happen with a scheme that is incompatible with any software/hardware wallet we know today if tomorrow everybody at AirGap abandons ship and the wallet simply dies? I got the answer that someone would have to create their own software supporting the social recovery feature and hope it works. That's what I expected to hear as well. 

How does that even affect funds recovery though, because the Airgap tools are open-source so there is no risk of them disappearing anywhere (as opposed to, say, an exchange or closed-source wallet).

Both reasons you mentioned are proof that people should not use and trust any form of Shamir's Secret Sharing.
Lack is clear standards and confusion between different implementations are big disadvantages, and this was never widely accepted by bitcoin community.
Sure it can be better in some cases than holding simple paper with seed words, but this could be mitigated with one or more passphrases.
Adding extra complexity with obscure incompatible system is no go for me, and until I see compatibility with other wallets I don't think it's safe enough to use Airgap wallet social feature.

The code of our apps is completely open source and the part of the social recovery is only a few lines of code. I would recommend that you use an old deployed version of the app (eg. an APK from GitHub). You could also run the project yourself, or someone could build a standalone version of the recovery feature.


SSKR is a completely separate standard, so it is not compatible with our implementation. Once we add SSKR, the generation part will be replaced completely, so going forward it will only be possible to create SSKR shares. But our apps will always support recovery of "old" social recovery setups, we'll never remove that.

So if I set up a social recovery option, and then AirGap wallet with all its services ceases to exist 5-10 years from now, how can I regain access to my funds if the scheme doesn't work with other hardware/software wallets? If you adopt the SSKR standard at one point in the future, does it affect all previously configured social recovery setups? Those created before your adoption of SSKR or whatever other model you decide to go for?

Hi. I'm Andy, one of the developers on the AirGap project.


There are 2 reasons why we called the feature "Social Recovery" instead of "Shamir's Secret Sharing".

1. The term "Shamir's Secret Sharing" is known in some parts of the community, but because of the lack of a clear standard (at least at the time when we added the feature many years ago), we didn't want users to make false assumptions, eg. regarding compatibility with other implementations (there were a few CLI tools but they were not compatible with our implementation).
2. The term "Social Recovery" is clearer for less technical users.

As already mentioned above, our scheme is not compatible with any other implementation, eg. Trezor or Keystone. The main reason is that our implementation is older than the finalised SLIP-39 standard, which is used by Trezor and Keystone.

The reason we did not change to the SLIP-39 standard after it was finalised is because SLIP-39 does not allow to split up an existing 12 / 24 word mnemonic. So it does not allow you to go from BIP39 mnemonic => Shamir Shares => BIP39 mnemonic. With our implementation, this is possible.

But now that the SSKR standard was defined by blockchain commons, we are planning to adopt it in the near future.


You are right, SSS does not remove the single point of failure regarding mnemonic usage, but it does solve the single point of failure regarding secret backup and storage.


As far as I know, only Coldcard supports Seed XOR at the moment. Hopefully more wallets will follow soon.


As mentioned above, the Social Recovery feature is just a name we use for our implementation of the Shamir's Secret Sharing scheme. I don't know much about Threshold Signatures or Multi-Party computation so I can't talk about them. But from what I've heard they sound very interesting and could solve a few problems.

Can you make a comparison between your Social recovery feature VS Shamir Secret Sharing VS Threshold Signatures Schemes or Multi-Party Computation, for example? Why are your methods better and recommended compared to the ones mentioned? MPC is something I recently heard about, but it's in connection with an altcoin that I don't want to be accused of shilling if I mention it. It's easy to find on the first page of a Google search and the project begins with "Q".   

Than it's much better to call it with it's real name instead of inventing something like Social recovery feature.
It is also important for compatibility to say if your Secret Shamir Scheme is compatible with one that is available in other hardware wallets like Trezor Model T and Keystone wallet.

Yes it is, unless you add multiple passphrases, but we are talking about improving something and removing single point of failure, that was not accomplished with SSS because one guy controls everything.

That is better, but I don't know who currently uses this except maybe Coldcard.