The Key Creation Ceremony
By Joshua McDougall on The Capital
Last year the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium (C4) hosted the Blockchain Training Conference and I had the pleasure of teaching about secure key generation and the pageantry that is involved in a “Key Ceremony”. This is a topic that’s pretty important when we’re talking about the special secrets that secure our digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin.
Personally, I had a lot of fun creating and teaching the course, so I’m pretty excited to have it published now. It may sound like an overly technical topic at first, but this class was developed for people across all skill ranges and backgrounds to learn about what cryptographic keys are, what entropy is and why it is important, and how backups can be built, tested and stored.
You can follow along using Ceremony.Guide, a free online tool that teaches concepts around key generation, such as entropy and data formats. Careful though, the Ceremony Guide tool is for educational purposes only and shouldn’t be used for creating real keys!
The class also mentions a number of items and tools that can help in the process of generating strong keys. If you’d like your own set, those items included:
- Way too many playing cards
- A LOT of dice
- TrueRNG
- Tamper-evident bags (Not the clear kind!)
- Crypto Key Stack, CryptoSteel, or Steely
- KeepKey, Ledger, or Trezor
The slide deck is also available. I recommend downloading it and running it locally, but you can also use the online viewer:
