Exuberance over the rollback on the NSA mass surveillance programs earlier this year was quickly dealt a crushing blow as the news broke about the mass-hacking affecting some 4 million U.S. Federal employees. Soon enough, matters further deteriorated with the release of a statement by code specialists on the debate whether or not to allow special governmental access to encrypted personal data. Growing concerns are only expected to add fuel to the already agitated discourse we have been having on privacy and cyber-security especially as the presidential race keeps heating up heading off to the primaries.

Ever since the 2013 revelations about mass surveillance, developments like these make it ever more appealing for us to finally take (our private) matters in our own hands. It is in our search for a solution to this that we might start feeling hard-pressed to have our own pair of public and private keys.

Public-key cryptography builds on an extremely uneven situation where encrypting a piece of data is a cinch with the use of the public key, whereas decryption is mind-bogglingly hard unless you happen to possess the associated private key, too. And although such methods have numerous advantages over simple password encryption (there’s no need here to send a password over the Internet when using it for the very first time), it isn’t entirely without its own quirks.

One of the most annoying features of this approach is that the sheer size and make-up of a private key (pure gibberish, really) rule out the possibility of memorizing it for the most of us. To save the day, we need to store a copy of it somewhere very safe and secure, either literally so, or else by setting it up as a bounty for prospective burglars into our apartment.