Steemitblog Keychain News

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This is a brief report of one highlight of the post

Steemitblog the Steemit platform’s developers account recently announced that Steem Keychain is now integrated into steemit.com!
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This means that you can now sign into steemit.com without entering private keys into your browser. Keychain is a browser extension similar to Metamask for Ethereum that enables Steem users to store their keys and broadcast transactions to the blockchain.
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Discussion of why this is important by developer @yabamat

In what ways is Keychain safer than simply saving private keys in our browser the normal way?

While saving keys in the browser isn't really an issue, putting them into websites is. When you put a key into a website (or any data really) you're giving it to them and you have to trust that they don't misuse that data, either on purpose or accidentally, AND that the site doesn't get hacked. Many people have said that it doesn't matter if steemit.com gets hacked since the keys are only used on the client side, but that's not true. A hacker could modify the website code to steal the keys entered on the client side.
If you use keychain, then steemit.com or any other site never gets access to your keys. Instead they just request that the extension sign transactions with your keys on their behalf. This means that even if a site gets hacked or does something malicious they can never get your keys.
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Who will potentially have access to our data saved within Keychain?

The code for keychain is open source and is available to anyone here: https://github.com/MattyIce/steem-keychain For the maximum security you can download the code straight from the repo and install it in your browser that way rather than through the chrome or firefox web stores. This ensures that even should the chrome web store account that publishes the extension get hacked and a malicious update be published, your keys would still be safe.
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Thank you @yabamat for these explanations in the comments section of the Steemitblog post.
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Special Thanks to @eonwarped who submitted the keychain PR.

Keychain was released by the developer of SteemMonsters, @yabapmatt and is open source. You can view the github repo here
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The Steem Keychain extension currently includes the following features:
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Store an unlimited number of Steem account keys, encrypted with AES

Easily view balances, transaction history, voting mana, and resource credits for all of your accounts

Send STEEM and SBD transfers right from the extension

Securely interact with Steem-based websites that have integrated with Steem Keychain

Manage transaction confirmation preferences by account and by website

Manage automatic lock settings to lock when the browser is closed, the device is locked, or after the browser is idle for a specified period of time.

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