Articles on 808bits

The key that never exists: a threshold signing ceremony in your browser

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A cryptographic key is a single point of failure. Whoever holds it holds everything, and most custody disasters reduce to that. Threshold cryptography asks a different question: what if the key never exists in one place, not even at birth?

On this page, three keyholders - alice, bob and carol - create one key together. Any two of them can sign; nobody ever holds the whole key, and there is no trusted dealer who makes it and splits it. The key is born already in pieces.

FIPS 140-3 is not a security guarantee, and auditors know it

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:16:08 +0200

A sales engineer at one of the major HSM vendors told me recently that over 90 percent of their customers who buy FIPS-enabled HSMs run them with FIPS mode disabled. They pay a premium for the certificate, then switch off the configuration it describes. By the end of this article you will understand why that is often the correct engineering decision.

On September 21, 2026, every remaining FIPS 140-2 certificate moves to NIST’s historical list, and modules on that list should no longer be included in new federal procurements. Procurement teams are spending this summer chasing vendors for FIPS 140-3 paper, and vendors are spending it in a validation queue. A lot of money and attention is flowing toward a certificate.

You can't audit entropy after the fact: operator lessons from the Coldcard seed failure

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over two days starting July 30, 2026, coins left Coldcard-generated wallets in three coordinated waves. By August 2, forensic work by Galaxy Research put the confirmed total near 1,367 BTC ($88.6M) across more than 4,500 addresses. The victims had done what the industry told them to do. They bought a well-regarded, security-focused hardware signer, generated the seed on the device, and kept it offline. Many had not touched those wallets in years. The attacker never touched a single device.

The Fireblocks recovery tools are free. Here's what they prove, and what they don't

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fireblocks gives every workspace owner an open-source path to reconstruct their keys from the customer-held backup: the legacy fireblocks-key-recovery-tool and the current Recovery Utility. This is genuinely good design: your exit from the platform does not depend on the platform being alive.

But “the tool exists” and “we are recoverable” are different claims. This article walks through what the tooling actually does, what a successful run proves, and the gap between that proof and what a board, an auditor, or a regulator means when they ask “can you recover?”

DORA exit strategies for digital-asset custody: what a reviewer actually wants to see

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DORA (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, in application since January 2025) requires financial entities to maintain documented exit strategies for ICT third-party providers supporting critical or important functions, and to manage concentration risk on those providers. For most ICT services, firms can lean on familiar patterns: data export, parallel running, a migration plan to an alternative vendor.

Digital-asset custody platforms break those patterns in an interesting way: the thing you need to take out is not data. It’s signing capability over assets on-chain, and whether you can actually take it out depends on cryptographic facts about your setup, not on contract clauses.

How to run a custody key-recovery drill without exposing a single private key

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fire drills don’t burn the building down. A custody key-recovery drill, done right, follows the same principle: you rehearse every step of recovering from your key backup except the one step that creates risk: materializing a private key.

This matters because the most common objection to rehearsing recovery is security: “we don’t want to handle live key material more often than we must.” Correct instinct, wrong conclusion. Modern MPC recovery tooling separates verification (reconstruct internally, confirm against registered public keys, expose nothing) from revelation (export the private key). A drill built on verify-only execution gets you nearly all of the assurance with none of the exposure.