What is Shamir Backup? Protection against theft and loss | Posted by SatoshiLabs | March 2024

Imagine this. You have your family’s treasured secrets to great sauces that have been passed down for generations. Protecting it is very important and important. (It is valuable as a recovery seed that helps protect your coins and tokens.)

Typically, the family would write down the ingredients and instructions for this secret sauce on a piece of paper. If this paper is lost, damaged or falls into the wrong hands, its unique flavor may be lost forever or copied by others without your consent.

So what is the way out? In — Shamir backs up.

Shamir’s backup involves breaking down the secret sauce recipe into its individual components.

• Each ingredient and step is written on a separate card.
• Then distribute these cards to trusted family members. Let’s call this the process of ‘recovery equity’.
• To make a batch of sauce, you need a certain number of ingredient cards (threshold) must be put together.
• Some relatives hold more cards than others, depending on how much you trust them and how integral they are to the recipe-making process.

Now, if one of your relatives accidentally loses a card or an outsider finds just one of these cards, you won’t have enough information to recreate your secret sauce because you don’t have the complete recipe. As long as the number of lost cards is below the threshold, your family’s cooking secrets will remain safe.

Additionally, if you want to prepare sauce for a family gathering and some of your members are not around, you can still make sauce as long as you can collect enough cards to meet predetermined criteria.

The Shamir Backup Method protects your family’s secret sauce recipe from a single point of failure. It also gives you the flexibility to continue the tradition of creating legendary sauces if you still have access to a critical mass of components, even if some of the recipes are temporarily unavailable.

For hardware wallet and recovery seed protection, Shamir Backup allows users to split their wallet’s private keys into multiple unique recovery shares.

memo: Shamir Backup is available for Trezor Model T and Trezor Safe 3.

• When setting up a new wallet with a Shamir backup, your Trezor device will prompt you to create a certain number of recovery shares.
• You can create up to 16 shares, each consisting of a sequence of 20 or 33 words.
• After creation, you need to determine the threshold, which is the minimum number of shares required to recover the wallet.

(Other) Note: Thresholds are an important component of the Shamir backup strategy. Determine how many shares you need to rebuild your wallet. For example, if you set the threshold to “2/3”, recovery will require 2 out of 3 total shares.