Inheriti Deep-Dive Series // 005 : Introducing Inheriti — An Overview of Key Features and Benefits
Welcome to the fifth article in our Inheriti Deep-Dive Series.
In our previous article ‘Inheriti Deep-Dive Series // 004 : Everything You Didn’t Realize You Needed from a Digital Inheritance Platform’, we outlined all the requirements that a really world-class digital inheritance and private key backup solution would need to have in order to be truly deserving of your trust and attention.
As you’ll see, Inheriti — Safe Haven’s flagship product that is available for use now — meets all of these requirements (and more), and in this article we’ll explain how.
Inheriti: the only truly decentralized (and totally secure) digital inheritance and private key backup solution in the world.
#1 — Multi-Purpose Capability (Digital Inheritance and Personal Backups)
With Inheriti, you can create a variety of digital inheritance plan structures to fit your own unique circumstances, such as the number of beneficiaries.
You can also utilize Inheriti’s in-built security features to make personal backups of your seed phrases and passwords.
As both a Digital Inheritance and secure Private Key Backup solution — Inheriti therefore solves the two biggest problems in crypto today.
#2 — Multi-Wallet Storage
Inheriti will allow you to store private key information and data relating to multiple wallets and exchange accounts.
- The current version allows storage of up to 500 characters, which means you can store seed phrases and passwords for multiple crypto wallets or exchange accounts
- Inheriti isn’t limited to crypto based information also — you can use it to store secret family recipes, industrial formulas, GPS coordinates and so on.
- The forthcoming release of Inheriti Vault will significantly increase the amount of data you can store, so you can choose to protect digital assets of almost any size including documents, images and even videos.
#3 — Fully Decentralized
Independent security audits undertaken in December 2020 by the leading firm of Cybersecurity Specialists Red4Sec confirmed that no private key data is held on any Safe Haven back-end systems or repositories.
“After reviewing the platform, as of 12/28/2020, it can be concluded that Inheriti’s audited platform does not store critical information from the users. The platform only manages the data of a normal connection and the minimum necessary provided by users for the correct operation of the service.
… It is verified that the platform does not currently store private keys, seeds or passphrases in the backend, in fact the operations with these are carried out on the client side.” Red4Sec — As part of Data Integrity Security Audit (December-2020)
This prevents the retrieval of any secret data due to either accidental leak or malicious hacking attempts.
Quite simply, you cannot steal what isn’t there.
Inheriti is therefore the only platform-based digital inheritance or private key backup solution that can make the claim of being fully decentralized in the truest sense of the word.
Note: In September 2020, Red4Sec also verified the safety and stability of the Inheriti platform’s Smart Contracts.
#4 — Fragmentation of Data
Inheriti uses an implementation of the Shamir Secret Sharing (SSS) cryptography scheme along with Safe Haven’s own (multiple patents pending) Secret Sharing Distribution Protocol (SSDP) to split the secret data into multiple ‘shares’ for maximum security.
These ‘shares’ are distributed to each of the intended beneficiaries on Safe Haven’s own FIDO2 / U2F ‘SafeKey’ Hardware Security Module (HSM) cold-storage devices.
One special share — the ‘Validator’ share — is stored on the blockchain.
#5 — Multi-Storage Layers
As a web3 platform, Inheriti uses a multi-layer distribution process that results in the storage of the separate secret data ‘shares’ across a mixture of storage media including the blockchain and cold-storage for maximum security.
This also means that Inheriti is theoretically Quantum Computing-Proof.
Even in the extremely unlikely event that a quantum computer is able to decrypt any of the shares held on the blockchain, it would not be possible to gain access to the remaining shares needed to reconstruct the secret data because these are held on separate cold-storage SafeKey devices.
#6 — Top-Level Security Protocols and Encryption
Along with the fragmentation of private key data, Inheriti uses a combination of high-level security measures and protocols that minimizes the likelihood of security breaches, as follows:
- Inheriti’s client-based top-layer is written in Javascript which has certain in-built security features such as preventing reading and writing to disk, not allowing access to other browser windows or domains, and not allowing any actions that are not permitted by the browser itself.
- All SafeKeys (and the data held within them) are protected by PINs that are stored using complex, salted SHA-256 hashing algorithms (preventing cleartext access) and a maximum PIN attempt counter that prevents brute force and rainbow table attacks.
- All private key ‘share’ data that is stored on either the blockchain or on SafeKeys is encrypted (in-motion or at-rest) using the AES256 encryption standard — the first (and only) publicly accessible cipher approved by the NSA for information classified Top Secret. As of 2021, all known attacks appear to render a brute-force search of the key space infeasible on foreseeable classical and quantum computers.
- Safe Haven maintains an ongoing commitment to undertake regular independent security audits with some of the best cybersecurity specialists around (including Red4Sec).
- Safe Haven is also undertaking a 24-month bug bounty campaign to ensure the ongoing security of the Inheriti platform in association with Intigriti, Europe’s premier ethical hacking and bug bounty organization.
#7 — Protection against Fraudulent Data Release
Inheriti has a number of secure fail-safe mechanisms to prevent any fraudulent attempts to recover your secret data while you — the ‘Owner of the Estate’ (OE) — are still alive.
- When the recovery process to ‘merge’ the previously fragmented private key ‘shares’ is initiated, Inheriti will invoke various ‘Dead Man Switch’ (DMS) mechanisms that request you to respond within a set time period using a combination of methods (such as platform login or email responses).
- As the Owner of the Estate, this affords you significant peace of mind as you are given multiple opportunities to confirm “I’m not dead yet”.
- Only when no responses are received within the allotted period, will the platform release the all-important ‘Validator’ share from the blockchain so the merge process can commence.
- At this point, the required number of Beneficiaries must also then come together with each of their shares on their separate SafeKey devices — before the shares can be recombined and decrypted — and the private key data revealed.
#8 — Optional Legal Professional Involvement
Inheriti uses a Separation of Roles concept that differentiates the role of a trusted individual (or organisation) tasked with initiating the data recovery ‘merge’ process — known as the ‘Merge Authority’ — as separate from the actual ‘Beneficiaries’ that you want to receive the secret data.
This means you can optionally choose to appoint a qualified legal professional as the ‘Merge Authority’ who can verify that a valid Death Certificate exists before the data retrieval ’merge’ process can be initiated thereby giving you additional peace of mind.
Finally, the intellectual property behind the world’s only decentralized (and totally secure) digital inheritance solution is the first of its kind. For that reason, Safe Haven has three worldwide patents pending filed in the U.S., Europe, and China to protect the Inheriti platform and our Secret Share Distribution Protocols (SSDP).
So, hopefully you can see why we’re so confident when we say that Inheriti is the only truly decentralized (and totally secure) digital inheritance and backup solution available in the world.
Quite honestly, there is nothing like it.
Our Inheriti Community Edition (CE) version is immediately available with full capability for creating digital inheritance as well as personal backup plans.
As always, all of us at Safe Haven want to thank our community for your continued support. Be sure to keep up with our official channels!
Find out more about Safe Haven and the range of solutions and products within our ecosystem: https://safehaven.io
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