Can I create a deterministic wallet and export/disclose individual keys?

Colba17

newbie

Activity: 19

Merit: 1

Quote from: ranochigo on May 26, 2017, 03:03:57 AM

It depends.

For wallets using hardened keys, it is fully safe to export private keys with zero risk of the whole chain of addresses getting compromised if a single key gets compromised.

However, if your wallet happens to create unhardened keys. Given a public parent key and a private child key, you can calculate the private keys of the entire chain of addresses. This is very dangerous if you do leak the public parent key.

I'm not too sure about Armory however.

Thanks. How can I determine is my wallet software uses a hardened or unhardened key?

ranochigo

legendary

Activity: 3038

Merit: 4418

Crypto Swap Exchange

It depends.

For wallets using hardened keys, it is fully safe to export private keys with zero risk of the whole chain of addresses getting compromised if a single key gets compromised.

However, if your wallet happens to create unhardened keys. Given a public parent key and a private child key, you can calculate the private keys of the entire chain of addresses. This is very dangerous if you do leak the public parent key.

I'm not too sure about Armory however.

Colba17

newbie

Activity: 19

Merit: 1

If one private key of a deterministic wallet gets compromised, are the other keys (and the seed) still secure?

Example: create an armory offline wallet with seed. I want to transfer some BTC from one address in the offline armory wallet by importing the private key for one of the addresses in the offline wallet to a Bitcoin Core online wallet for whatever reason. If the private key is somehow compromised, are the remaining BTC on different addresses in the same armory offline wallet still secure (same seed)? Thanks!!

Topic: Can I create a deterministic wallet and export/disclose individual keys? (Read 468 times)