Keychain Added to Steemit.com!
We are excited to announce that Steem Keychain is now integrated into steemit.com! That 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.
Keychain gives Steem users more choice with respect to how they leverage the world's most used blockchain-powered social application: steemit.com. One of the benefits of open source software is that 3rd party developers can add features which enable users to customize their software experience to their unique needs, which is precisely why were happy to add support for this 3rd party extension to the site.
Keychain was released by the developer of SteemMonsters, @yabapmatt and is open source. You can view the github repo here.
From the Repo
The Steem Keychain extension currently includes the following features:
- 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
Community Contributions
At Steemit, we want to empower community developers to help improve steemit.com and steemitwallet.com. We have an amazing developer community that we have failed to fully honor in the past. We know that many of them have become disillusioned with the process of contributing to Condenser (the software that powers steemit.com and steemitwallet.com) and we want to do whatever we can to reverse that.
That’s why we were glad to merge the PR submitted by @eonwarped which added Keychain to steemit.com. We would have liked to merge this change sooner, however, we determined that it would be safer for our users to implement this change after we had split off the wallet (steemitwallet.com) from steemit.com.
Other community contributions that were merged are:
- Shorten permlinks from nested comments #3357, by @quochuy
- Mark when a post/comment has been edited#3358, by @quochuy
- fix non-existing post 404 #3359, by @blockchainstudio
- Add ellipsis overflow for author description#3350, by @quochuy
- Toggle dark/light theme on the body tag #3348, by @quochuy
- Tag Steemit employees #3341, by @Smittyvb
- esteem:// protocol support #3323, by @good-karma
- Set editor preview max-width to 42.125rem #3322, by @quochuy
MVP: @quochuy
The majority of this batch of community pull requests were submitted by the user @quochuy making them the obvious candidate for this week’s Most Valuable Programmer ;). Steemit’s community is its “killer app” and we believe that by empowering community developers to add the features that users want to steemit.com will be critical for creating the unparalleled user experience necessary to mainstream Steem and blockchain generally. Without great contributions from community developers like @quochuy, this won’t be possible.
Special Thanks
Thanks again to @eonwarped who submitted the keychain PR (and a number of PRs that have now been merged) and the other great community developers who have submitted PRs.
The Steemit Team
Woohoo! Very excited to see it live. Thanks everyone that contributed to Steemit, it's really great to see.
Props to stoodkev for coding keychain.
My pleasure! Glad to see it on Steemit, finally!
Yes, yes... Mega props to you too bro. :)
But is keychain being used for both Posting AND the wallet? I dont see any keychain support on the steemitwallet.com page which is the whole point of having keychain....right? so I just think @steemitblog should explain why its not used on the wallet page... Or are they just not going to ad it and just leave the wallet page the same? Maybe a quick video popup about keychain would be appropriate, not all users read the @steemitblog
But hey you predicted this a few weeks ago @aggroed in PAL discord when you told me that steemit inc has the repo for keychain and just has to add it.... imagine if steemit inc had sponsored the creation of keychain.... its on e of the things they should have been helping develop, its weird how steemit inc lets the community do all the infrastructure and heavy lifting , or at least too much of it...
I appreciate the update from steemit blog When is @ned going to give us a frigin roadmap? It would be so nice to see a sort of long term marketing strategy on paper from @steemitblog I think that would help the price a lot.
Good job mate. :)
You may have convinced me. I will revisit it this weekend.
👆 this guy is criminal !
Great job @eonwarped and good to finally see community commits beeing merged into the official condenser repo!
@eonwarped Thanks a lot for this and @stoodkev too! Will keep contributing to keychain!
곰돌이가 @blockchainstudio님의 소중한 댓글에 $0.004을 보팅해서 $0.019을 살려드리고 가요. 곰돌이가 지금까지 총 4908번 $55.172을 보팅해서 $62.395을 구했습니다. @gomdory 곰도뤼~
Great stuff mate. I’m glad it got accepted.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Wow congrats to @eonwarped and all involved seems like it would be very convenient and user friendly.
You da man Eon... a true treasure for this blockchain and this community! I'm mega proud of you.
Congrats for getting the PR merged into the condenser! It was about time. :)
That is great news. SteemKeychain is a great extension that I'm using regularly. I've also submitted a PR to allow to trigger SteemKeychain when clicking on SteemConnect transfer links. Thanks @yabapmatt and @stoodkev for bringing it to life.
Most Valuable Programmer of the week?! Wow, thank you @steemitblog . It's great that you guys have opened the development of the app to the community.
Thank you @therealwolf, @jk6276 and @blockchainstudio for the shoutout and nice words.
If you like my work, support me and cast a vote for my witness
Congrats man!
And thanks for your hard work and shoutout!
Nice job. Thank you
Keep doing this amazing job @quochuy.
Thank you.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Thanks for all your great work!
Posted using Partiko Android
This sounds potentially useful for me.
Questions...
These are very important questions.
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.
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.
Thanks for the detailed response. This makes much more sense to me.
It is my understanding that the keychain extension is only compatible with desktop internet browsers. Are there plans (or is there even a benefit) for having a mobile version of keychain? If there is, I would vote for that worker proposal since it sounds like you did this basically for free.
Yes, Keychain is only for desktop browsers currently. I would love to do a mobile version and think it is very important for the Steem ecosystem but we just don't have the resources right now. I do plan to submit a worker proposal for that when/if the Steem worker proposal system goes live.
This would be fantastic!
I would love to use Partiko but they want your active key to sign in on mobile.
I simply don’t trust using my active key ever with Steem Connect on a mobile device.
Awesome! I will keep an eye out for it and certainly vote for that proposal when I see it. Thanks.
is there a way to save the password in keychain , so it will not ask it again and again everyday ? I put usually hard passwords and it's hard to remember and I don't like to entre the passoword everyday.
Would this be vulnerable to a user’s computer being hacked? If they gain access on client side then they would be able to gain access to anything their keychain can grant access to? There’s vulnerabilities at every point when there’s an exchange of sensitive information no matter what, correct?
Asking for clearer understanding of the purpose of the keychain. I thought the purpose of having the different keys was for security, if one is compromised others are still potentially safe? But if the keychain is compromised isn’t all of it unsafe?
With Keychain, malicious website code cannot steal your private keys. With Keychain, all signatures are made using the extension, which defaults to you approving every signature.
Using this model, you should never need to enter your Steem private keys into a website, which should greatly reduce the possibilities to have your keys compromised.
Re #1, I think the advantage of KeyChain is compared to single site posting key log-in is marginal, but compared to using a TTP solution like SteemConnect is massive, and Steemit Inc leading the way in implementing it is promising with respect to the potential of doing away with TTPs in the STEEM eco system all together.
It's a first step. An important first step towards a SteemConnect/SteemLogin)TTP free DApp eco system, and a first glimmer of hope after the public support for EIP that Steemit Inc hasn't completely lost all sense of direction.
Keychain is great, just wish they had a version for mobile
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Wow will have to look into it. Seems this could be very very useful especially down the road when the Steem Ecosystem has so much going on in it!
Nothing better than convenience and time saving when its safe effective and reliable!
What about STEEM listing on Coinbase?
according to last Coinbase twitter poll, or responses from users rather, when coinbase asked which coin should be added AFTER EOS was already added to coinbase pro, well Steem was the next biggest group of users on twitter representing their coin.... I am pretty sure that since Steem has no more competitors as theyve all been Added to coinbase already, Steem is going to be next....
Coinbase has EOS and a few other DPOS coins already so it should be no problem to add steem
Exodus crew have also expressed interest on twitter to add steem to exodus, it will take a clever work around for new accounts maybe will have the ability to add keys like vessel, but EOS was worked out on Exodus with a button to unstake, but not to stake... exodus with steem will also be really nice. Steem on coinbase and exodus could be bigger for steem than we realize. Coinbase SHOULD honestly be adding it next if their twitter comments are listened to and I think they are.... Maybe even bitshares on coinbase after steem imagine that...
Steemit, thank your for implementing this. Very sensible and I am impressed!
I've been using Keychain with @dlease and it's much much better than SteemConnect
Super happy to about Steemit also integrating Keychain
This will make my massive steem onboarding plan with PushBook Network lot easier
Thanks a million
well ya keychain is a great extension and steemconnect v3 now in beta mode you can check it
Thanks
I'll check it out
How to use it for the first time?
Good question. I was thinking the same!
Somebody does need to do a step by step blog on it, I have no idea what it is or how to use it.
Simply install this extension for Google Chrome or Brave Browser works on both
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/steem-keychain/lkcjlnjfpbikmcmbachjpdbijejflpcm?hl=en
This is an extension... when you have it installed in your browser you just click on the little Blue Keys in top right corner of your browser,
When you first see Keychain it will ask you to CREATE a password for logging in, (NOT your keys, you enter those letter by clicking the settings button, the four squares in the top right
and now the keychain app will pop up and you enter your active and posting keys and then you have a wallet built in to your browser for steem dapps like steemit steem-engine etc (Sorry the firefox addon page was taken down last i checked but im sure @yabapmatt can explain where to get if youre using Firefox)
Thank you @ackza :)
I thought you put in those keys right way :/
That is why I got apprehensive in using it.
Aggroed said in his blog to put masterpassword so ... that is why.
@cryptopie I have been using Keychain for a while, and I really love it.
I only leave my posting key in the extension, and when I need my active key I just paste it into Keychain. Then I remove it after I am finished!
I just bought steem today, powered up, and delegated and then removed my active key..... very nice! :)
I am waiting for the IOS mobile.......
I think the only downside would be if you stayed signed in ,and someone got access to your computer, but when you close your browser it logs you out.
Are you sue @aggroed saiud to put in owner key/ Theres no place to even enter your owner key in Keychain at east not that I know, it forces you to hve good pratice of using Active and Posting instead.... i know the feeling of thinking its too much work and too "risky" to handle keys liek that but itrust me ts too risky NOt to use active and posting and keep Owner key on Paper like i remember @elgeko educating me on years ago, when he first made me realize how an owner key can be kept on paper and never used, and how youc an just use active and posting
https://steemit.com/keychain/@aggroed/steemit-adds-keychain-support
@ackza
Great app, I hope you add a PIN code before any important action specially the sending.