NEWBIES INITIATIVE TASK 3: HIVE KEYS AND SECURITY

In the third edition of the weekly newbies initiative discord meeting, we treated the topic 'Hive keys and security'. The major purpose of this lecture was to help us understand what keys are, to help us prevent our accounts from getting lost or hacked, and ways we can secure our accounts in the best ways possible.

Our tutor for this topic was @depressedfuckup and he taught us a whole lot of valuable points which will be useful to us at some points in time. @starstrings01 also shared some amazing tips at a point in the meeting. Overall, it was very educative and I personally learned a lot.

Unlike every other social media platforms, your Hive account is part of your net worth and it's natural to want to keep it safe. The point of having security is so that your account doesn't get tampered with. If it does, your account falls into the risk of being lost and getting compromised.

Scammers are always trying to invent better and more convincing ways to get your keys, since they can't outrightly ask for it and you'll give it to them. So they create phishing links and use them as baits, attach an attractive comment to it so you can click it.

A website is usually attached to those links, and there you might be told to enter your username and password. It would mostly be designed with an Hive interface, so you wouldn't get suspicious. You would think you are on your way to earn some extra free dollars, but in reality, you are on your way to losing your whole account.

On Hive, everyone can see what goes on in your account, but they can't interact with it because they don't have access to your keys. I guess that explain how powerful our keys are and why we have to keep them safe. There are different keys on Hive and they serve different purposes.

Basically, there is a key for everything you want to do on Hive. In case one of those keys get compromised, you don't completely lose your account. You'll only lose the special privilege to access the feature that the specific key has.

The Hive keys are:

• Posting Key
• Memo Key
• Private Active Key
• Private Owner Key
• Master password

My partner for the week is @edwincj

• If your partner for the week from Newbies-hive mistakenly dropped their active key in a Discord channel, highlight the various steps you'll indulge in to keep such account assets safe from potential theft.

If my partner mistakenly drops his active key in a discord channel. I would advice him immediately he figures out, to login on hive.blog with his posting key.

Then click on the reset password option.

Then the next step is to input your current password in order to generate a new password.

The private owner key will be used to reset other keys, while your master key will then be used to be generate new keys and a new PDF containing all the new keys will be downloaded.

This way, my partner will be able to recover his account and prevent it from getting lost forever.

• What advice would you give to your friend, in regard to safekeeping his/her keys?

There are different ways in which one can keep one's keys safe. One of the best ways might be to print the keys out or write it down and then find a safe place to keep it. The only disadvantage of this is that it might be quite stressful to be typing it out anytime you need it.

Most participants suggested keeping the keys on Gmail, google drive, chrome, etc, so that it stays saved, even if one changes phone. On the other hand, it can easily get compromised with this method, so @starstrings01 advised that we might change a letter or figure in those keys, to what we can always remember. So, whenever you automatically input the keys, you will just edit the figure or letter that was previously changed. This way, it will make it hard for hackers to tamper with one's account.

• Assuming your partner does not understand the use of each of these keys, how do you explain this to him/her in the simplest way?

Posting Key: As the name implies, this is the key that is used for posting and other things related to it, like posting comments, reblog, etc. This key is not used for anything related to making transactions.

Active Key: This key is used for making transactions and interacting with one's wallet. If you need to send HBD, save HBD, or make any financial transaction on Hive, this is the key to use.

Memo key: This is used to send encrypted messages i.e messages you don't want revealed to a third party. It is the least popular key

Private Owner Key: This is used to reset all other keys when your account has been tampered with.

Master Password: This is used to generate new keys to download in a PDF

Thanks for reading♥️