When interacting with EOS mainnet, especially at its early stage, you may suspect that your private key could be leaked. For example, you pasted it into a web application that you don’t fully trust.

With the cleos command-line tool, you can easily change the private key for your account in a short time and at no cost. You would, however, need to compile it on your Linux machine using the build instructions.

The operation is two-step, as you need to replace the owner and active key authorizations. Key access to an account is defined by its permissions (which we are going to modify with the below commands).

# create a new keypair

cleos create key # example the keys created:

# Private key: 5HpyL****

# Public key: EOS6wNAR**** # unlock your wallet with the old key

cleos wallet unlock # Now issue two transactions that modify the active

# and owner keys: cleos -u https://eos.greymass.com/ set account permission MYACCOUNT active EOS6wNAR**** owner -p MYACCOUNT@owner cleos -u https://eos.greymass.com/ set account permission MYACCOUNT owner EOS6wNAR**** -p MYACCOUNT@owner

Now you can save your new keys in a secure place and discard the old keys. You can also remove the old key from your wallet and import the new one: