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Topic: Are the 12 worded seeds really secure from Brute force? - page 2. (Read 1719 times)

hero member
Activity: 672
Merit: 504
a.k.a. gurnec on GitHub
Given enough private-key entropy, the weakest link in securing Bitcoin funds is the secp256k1 curve used to sign transactions and generate public keys from private ones, which takes on the order of 2^128 operations to break. Using more than 128 bits of entropy does not help at all. While it's true that Electrum uses slightly less entropy as Abdussamad mentions above (124 bits), practically speaking this is still in the same ball park.

Claiming that
Electrum is much weaker than that because they are using a list of words to create a password
is flat-out wrong.
legendary
Activity: 3808
Merit: 7912
Yes clearly, the seed is secure from brut force, at least for a human life, which is long enough in most of cases, (very few peoples need to stock or to spend money after the last day on earth, and for thoses concerned by "heaven", it seems, according to most of it's coming back visitors, that's there is no special need of any currency there  Grin )

 For those concerned by heaven, faith is the currency of the Kingdom of God and it is a requirement.  Not so sure you can "brute force" it though even if given an eternity.

legendary
Activity: 3066
Merit: 1147
The revolution will be monetized!
your math probably isn't correct because it is supposed to take until the heat death of the universe even if you use all the computers in the world non-stop  Roll Eyes. you're using just 1000 asics in your example.

part of that seed mnemonic is actually a checksum so you have to discount that. once you remove the checksum you find it's a 124bit seed. so 2^124 possibilities.


I thought that time frame was to discover a collision in a bitcoin address? Electrum is much weaker than that because they are using a list of words to create a password. However it is still a large number of possibilities to test.

This is why a good password should never be a word at all. With something like 60-80k English words in common use it is a relatively small task to test those possibilities. That is a dictionary attack.  
If instead you used a PW like:   %74Fkg#!jkF6l  it will require trying every possibility for all characters. That is brute forcing.
newbie
Activity: 21
Merit: 0
Yes clearly, the seed is secure from brut force, at least for a human life, which is long enough in most of cases, (very few peoples need to stock or to spend money after the last day on earth, and for thoses concerned by "heaven", it seems, according to most of it's coming back visitors, that's there is no special need of any currency there  Grin )
legendary
Activity: 3682
Merit: 1580
your math probably isn't correct because it is supposed to take until the heat death of the universe even if you use all the computers in the world non-stop  Roll Eyes. you're using just 1000 asics in your example.

part of that seed mnemonic is actually a checksum so you have to discount that. once you remove the checksum you find it's a 124bit seed. so 2^124 possibilities.

legendary
Activity: 3808
Merit: 1723
I found the dictionary file that Electrum uses to make the 12 worded seeds.

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/lib/wordlist/english.txt


At first I assumed that it used a 30000-60000 word dictionary but instead its 2048 words.

So with 12 words there are a possible 2048^12= 5.4445178707350154154139937189083e+39 combinations.

However can't someone design some SHA256 like ASIC which is capable of hashing 10TH/s to look for wallets with balances on them?

With 10TH/s it would take 544451787073501541541399371.89083 seconds to hash each and every possible commbination. However lets say there are already 1,000,000 seeds with some type of balance in them. That would reduce the collision to 544451787073501541541.39937189083 seconds.

Say someone builds like one thousand of these 10TH/s ASICs so it would take instead  544451787073501541.54139937189083 seconds to find one valid seed with a balance.

So if they hashed for an entire year it would take 17264452913 years to find that one seed.


So if my math is correct, it seems its next to impossible to brute force any Electrum keys.
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