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Where does electrum store the private key when unencrypted?
(lemmy.sdf.org)
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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Anybody with physical access to your machine has access to your crypto. Best case scenario the wallet is "locked" and they have to crack a password, which is many many many orders of magnitude easier than guessing your seed phrase.
100% that's why they call it a passphrase and not a password, it would be foolish to use something that can be brute forced. Anyways, my question is specifically about the storage of the key when unencrypted, would you happen to know if it ever touches the hard drive?
While I haven't read the source code myself, convention is that it would just be stored in memory, there is no reason for it to be stored on the drive and it would present security risks.
Okay thanks, that makes sense. I'm not highly technical so I'm just trying to run through every potential risk. That was the last thing bugging me.
Full-disk encryption with something like veracrypt can help mitigate any concerns about this. So long as an attacker does not have access to your computer while powered on (cold boot attacks/evil maid attacks etc), you are fine. For example, if a burglar absconds with your laptop encrypted w veracrypt and it's powered off? They're never getting the bitcoin wallet or anything else you had stored on there.
Thanks for the tip, I'll look into that