[bitcoin-dev] BIP39 seeds

Aymeric Vitte vitteaymeric at gmail.com
Sun Dec 23 22:41:00 UTC 2018


Exactly

This is surprising, I would have expected the probabilities to be much
more lower

It just means that scanning whatever (secret) book, document, link, etc,
you will find easily BIP39 seeds, even of 24 words

So, it just means that you don't have to write your seed since you can
recover it that way, given a secret source and specific algo with custom
parameters, this could be used for plausible deniability also

For now I still dislike BIP39 and alike (because I don't see very well
why it's easier to write n words that you cannot choose rather than a
32B BIP32 hex seed, and I have seen many people completely lost with
their wallets because of this), but I could change my mind, and despite
of further improvements for this ratio, could what I am suggesting make
sense?

Le 23/12/2018 à 19:46, Pavol Rusnak a écrit :
> On 22/12/2018 00:58, Aymeric Vitte via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>> Has anybody already looked at this: given N randomly chosen words
>> belonging to a BIP39 2048 words dictionary, what is the probability to
>> get a "valid" BIP39 seed (ie with the right checksum)?
> 1:256 for 24 words
> 1:16 for 12 words
>
> This ratio is not too great and will be improved in the upcoming SLIP39
> standard: https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0039.md
>


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