1. Establish the system boundary
Document the wallet environment, approved generation method, recovery information, device dependencies, and events that require restoration or migration. Decide what belongs on physical media and what belongs in a separate procedure. Avoid putting contextual labels next to secret material when those labels would help an unauthorized person.
2. Separate roles deliberately
Name the roles permitted to create, witness, transport, store, inspect, authorize recovery, perform recovery, and approve destruction. The same person should not silently accumulate incompatible permissions. Define absence, emergency, and personnel-departure procedures before they are needed.
3. Keep the workflow offline
Do not photograph, scan, email, message, print through a networked service, or paste a recovery phrase into general-purpose software. Prepare the space, tools, privacy controls, and inventory records in advance. Record only the approved secret information on the backup medium; keep process records free of the secret itself.
4. Evaluate locations as a portfolio
A strong container in a weak access environment is not a complete control. Review physical access, detection, visitor processes, environmental hazards, disaster correlation, travel, and retrieval time. For distributed procedures, assess how loss or compromise of each component changes the overall risk.
5. Verify without unnecessary exposure
Use a defined second-person check at creation. Schedule inspections that confirm presence, seal condition, inventory identity, and material condition without routinely reading the secret. Recovery rehearsals should use non-production credentials in an equivalent procedure whenever possible.
6. Treat change as a security event
Wallet migration, policy revision, facility change, role change, suspected access, damaged media, or an altered supplier specification can require review. Define who decides whether to replace, rotate, recover, or destroy a backup. Record decisions and evidence without copying secret material.
7. Select hardware after the procedure
Choose the Core Steel Plate for a direct controlled record or evaluate the Pro Multi-Share Vault only when a distributed model is approved. Review AegisSeed's security boundaries and run the procedure with invalid sample data before production use.