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Laptop being stolen: Certainly for normal users, yes. Don't let that happen. But you can protect yourself by moving funds to new addresses and deleting the old

Laptop being stolen: Certainly for normal users, yes. Don't let that happen. But you can protect yourself by moving funds to new addresses and deleting the old address keys. Poor man's forward secrecy. Since no one will probably do that, yeah .... all bets are off.

mootothemax 11y ago
>Laptop being stolen: Certainly for normal users, yes. Don't let that happen. But you can protect yourself by moving funds to new addresses and deleting the old address keys. Poor man's forward secrecy. Since no one will probably do that, yeah .... all bets are off. Heh, thanks, I appreciate your honesty! :) I guess it's a bit like the problems with trying to get mass adoption of PGP; the tech's there, but trying to get Joe Public to use it without missing any of the vital steps and not messing any of them up is difficult at best. For me, it's one of those "last, great"-levels of problem to solve: creating privacy tech that regular people who don't know or care about the specifics can use reliably and not mess up because they don't know and/or care.
firethief 11y ago
> you can protect yourself by [...] deleting the old address keys. I think it's important to distinguish between "deleting" and "securely erasing" here. The former often provides only a layer of obscurity, while the latter takes expertise to perform reliably. Ideally the wallet's key deletion functionality would include ensuring the private data doesn't remain on disk (and warn if the media makes this impossible), but I think this is more or less impossible; a secure erase facility really needs to be implemented at the OS level, since it requires knowledge of the workings of the filesystems in use as well as its interactions with the physical media. And it gets worse; in the case of any solid state devices that perform their own write balancing, even the operating system can't know what data has actually been lost. Of course, if someone has your (unencrypted) hard drive digging around for old ZCash key data is probably low on the list of privacy-compromising information available to them anyway.

mootothemax 11y ago

>Laptop being stolen: Certainly for normal users, yes. Don't let that happen. But you can protect yourself by moving funds to new addresses and deleting the old address keys. Poor man's forward secrecy. Since no one will probably do that, yeah .... all bets are off. Heh, thanks, I appreciate your honesty! :) I guess it's a bit like the problems with trying to get mass adoption of PGP; the tech's there, but trying to get Joe Public to use it without missing any of the vital steps and not messing any of them up is difficult at best. For me, it's one of those "last, great"-levels of problem to solve: creating privacy tech that regular people who don't know or care about the specifics can use reliably and not mess up because they don't know and/or care.

firethief 11y ago

> you can protect yourself by [...] deleting the old address keys. I think it's important to distinguish between "deleting" and "securely erasing" here. The former often provides only a layer of obscurity, while the latter takes expertise to perform reliably. Ideally the wallet's key deletion functionality would include ensuring the private data doesn't remain on disk (and warn if the media makes this impossible), but I think this is more or less impossible; a secure erase facility really needs to be implemented at the OS level, since it requires knowledge of the workings of the filesystems in use as well as its interactions with the physical media. And it gets worse; in the case of any solid state devices that perform their own write balancing, even the operating system can't know what data has actually been lost. Of course, if someone has your (unencrypted) hard drive digging around for old ZCash key data is probably low on the list of privacy-compromising information available to them anyway.