Kid Words

Overview

Durable and accessible paper key encoding that children can use.

Printable paper keys are used as the common last resort method for recovering lost account access. They increase security by empowering a user to wrestle a compromised account from the hands of an attacker.

Kid Words encoding increases the key durability by splitting the key using Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm into shards and encoding each shard and its checksum into a group of four-letter English words.

Paper keys are usually encoded using a PGP biometric word list . BIP39 is the most common standard implementation, in which the final few words encode the integrity of the key with a cyclical redundancy check. When printed and stored, such keys are not durable because they are vulnerable to minor physical damage.

Kid Words offers an alternative expanded encoding for secrets.

Benefits

1. The key shards can be recovered even by a child in emergency circumstances, when the paper had been partially damaged or the key shards are dictated over an unstable and noisy communication medium.

2. The key shards can be distributed among several physical locations. If a quorum amount of shards can be regathered, the key can be restored, even if some of the physical locations become inaccessible.

License

Kidwords is distributed under MIT Open Source license agreement.