Trustless Custody vaults are built on open-source software and mathematical concepts that have been proven for many years, some even for decades. You don’t need to understand any of this to use a TC vault, but we post it here as part of our commitment to transparency. We want you to feel confident that the product you’re purchasing is providing the security we claim. You are always welcome to have a third-party IT firm audit the vault we provide you to verify these claims.
To understand just how secure our vaults are, we need to cover some background first.
Why Open Source?
Open source software comes with several advantages when it comes to security and longevity. Much of the security software that underpins Fortune 500 companies, governments, and global internet infrastructure is open source. Open source software is software whose source code is available for anybody to read. This means anybody can inspect the software for security flaws and bugs. On the surface, this may seem insecure, after all, if anybody can see what the code says, can’t they easily figure out what its vulnerabilities are? Yes, and that is exactly the point. With closed-source software, you just have to hope and trust that the software is secure, because you have no way to audit its security yourself. There may be backdoors or easy to exploit and obvious security flaws that may linger for years undetected. But with open-source software, you know that anybody can audit its security and flaws will be found quickly. The longer an open-source software has been around, the more sure you can be of its security guarantees. If the world’s best hackers and cryptographers can view the source code of a program and find nothing wrong with it, that is a very good sign of the software’s security. This is why security-critical software like Bitcoin is built in an open source way.
Our Software
The operating system used by our vaults is Ubuntu Linux. Linux is widely regarded as the world’s most secure operating system. We use a combination of LUKS and Veracrypt with a minimum of 128-bit security for vault encryption, and ssss (Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme) for creating sub-keys. All of these tools have existed for over a decade and are widely considered to be best-in-class security-wise. An eight character Veracrypt or LUKS password would take millions of years to crack. Simply put, nobody is getting in without the password.
Quantum Computing Resistant Encryption
Everybody is talking about how quantum computing will break encryption. Our banks, our secure communications, even our phones are vulnerable to these attacks. Indeed, it is an issue anybody concerned with security should know about. But what is typically left out of the stories are two critically important facts. #1 is that quantum computers only break asymmetric encryption and #2 is that there are new asymmetric encryption systems in development and active use right now that are quantum resistant. For the purposes of your Trustless Custody vault, all encryption used by the vault is symmetric encryption. There is no reason that a quantum computer would be better at breaking symmetric encryption than a traditional computer, insuring that symmetric encryption will be safe for decades to come. The mathematical properties of symmetric encryption have existed and been studies for decades as well. From a theoretic information security perspective, symmetric encryption is the most secure way to encrypt data.
In other words, Bitcoin itself will be cryptographically insecure long before you vault will, since Bitcoin’s current protocol is based around asymmetric encryption and therefore vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. It’s not vulnerable today, but there will be a point in the future where quantum computers both exist and are affordable enough to crack the encryption which provides the underlying security mechanisms of Bitcoin. Luckily, many of the world’s brightest minds in cryptography are working on this exact problem and it’s fully expected that Bitcoin will implement new, quantum-resistant encryption well before we reach this point in time.
Auditable Security
Because our vaults are based on well-known security tools, you are welcome to hire anybody to audit the vault we provide you with. They will find and report back to you that our security claims are valid and that we are using the software we claim to be.
You may wonder then, if all of these tools exist, why not just make a vault on your own without hiring us? Well, you could of course! The reason to hire us is for our expertise in configuring these tools for them to work together seamlessly and be easy-to-use. The vault you purchase from us represents thousands of hours of training, coding, and cryptographic knowledge. Your heirs won’t have to wade through confusing documentation or command-line tools or need to know the difference between AES and SHA-256. Instead, they will get simple point-and-click directions for re-assembling subkeys and accessing the vault.