Topic: How do I identify the valid checksums for bip39 if I generate 11/12 of the word? (Read 613 times)

Hello, yes I was talking about botting into a USB drive tails OS on pc or laptop that already had an OS installed on it.  But thank you for the clarification and additional pointers.

Do you mean running Tails as a virtual machine within Windows? Or do you mean bypassing Windows altogether and simply booting the computer from the Tails USB? I wouldn't recommend the former, but I suspect you are talking about the latter.

If you boot to Tails, therefore completely ignoring Windows, and never connect to the internet or any other methods of communication while within Tails, then this is certainly a safer option than simply using Windows, and a good option if you cannot dedicate a device to be permanently airgapped. It would be even better if you can physically disconnect any connectivity hardware (unplug Ethernet cables, disconnect WiFi modules, etc.) and better still if you can physically disconnect any persistent storage (such as your hard drive(s)) while you are using Tails. But obviously the best option would be if you can dedicate an old machine to do this on which will never boot Windows or go online ever again.

Thank you for the suggestion. Question, what are your thoughts about putting into a Linux Tails Distribution on a Windows machine via a USB drive? I'm considering trying to use a persistent drive on a Tails distribution and not connect the Tails OS to any internet connection and then run it through this os. Are you aware of any possible security issues with this configuration? Thanks

Glad you got it all figured out.

For future, if you are planning on using this method (coin flips, calculate checksum, convert to seed phrase manually) to generate a seed phrase, then you should do it on a device which is permanently airgapped. That means it does not have an internet connection and it will never have an internet connection again. Even better if you physically remove things like the WiFi card and Bluetooth chip to ensure it has no wireless connectivity whatsoever. You should also make sure the device is completely clean, which means formatting it and installing a clean OS on it. If you are going through all this trouble anyway, then you would probably be better served simply installing a reputable open source Linux distro rather than Windows and Linux on top. There are a number of very easy to use Linux distros. Mint is probably the closest to Windows in terms of look and feel.

That did it!  Thank you very much!  So in summary (for the future folks here) on a Windows terminal I had to run through a few hoops here to get things setup.

- I first had to enable Windows Subsystem for Linux

- I then downloaded Kali from the Microsoft store.

- Next I had to setup Kali and create a username and password.

- I next had to log into su via the sudo su command

- Finally I performed the apt-get install libdigest-sha-perl command on the WSL window in sudo su mode and it installed all the necessary commands needed to perform the following line that resulted in the correct SHA256 has of my binary input:

└─# echo -n "1111001010110001011100111100010111010101101010101111111111101011101110000000010 0001001011111111101011111111000100000010101111100" | shasum -a 256
 -0
931258d717865a310cfc24a9161b21f4c0d02e0bb4cf12894516170a10e72339 ^-

Thanks again to everyone who helped me along here.  It was very educational!

Because the -0 argument tells it to run in bits mode, but in your command you are not feeding it a string of bits, but a string of bytes. You need to feed it the entropy in 0s and 1s as I said before:

Try this command and see if you get the correct checksum.

Hi again everyone,

I was hoping to get someone to double check the hash done on entropy in hex that I generated that is converted to F2B173C5D5AAFFEBB80425FF5FE2057C.

As per hosseinimr93's post, this translates to a SHA256 digest of 931258d717865a310cfc24a9161b21f4c0d02e0bb4cf12894516170a10e72339

Also, with the help of o_e_l_e_o , I was able to perform the following commands and was able to successfully load the Linux files into my Windows copy after logging into su:

apt-get install libdigest-sha-perl

I next performed the following commands but see a different SHA256 digest as noted below:

└─# echo -n F2B173C5D5AAFFEBB80425FF5FE2057C | shasum -a 256 -0
362695f3d7e699ecdae3536168fdc0f4e5696a1ee278c4800a626c0bac70746c ^-

I'm wondering why the discrepancy is occurring with hosseinimr93's SHA256 digest as from what I understood from
o_e_l_e_o :

"-a selects an algorithm, in this case 256. -0 tells it to read the input as bits, which is necessary when computing a checksum as above."

TIA

My bad. I'm thinking in terms of hexadecimal. You can append the 128 bit number with a "9" and then convert the 132 bit number to ones and zeroes, can't you?

Again, I have absolutely no idea about Windows, but on a pure Linux machine you could try the following command to install the necessary packages. It may or may not work on your Linux for Windows:

sha256sum won't work in this case, because it does not have an option to treat the input as bits.

-a selects an algorithm, in this case 256. -0 tells it to read the input as bits, which is necessary when computing a checksum as above.

I've had problems with shasum in the past. Try sha256sum:

This will return you the SHA256 hash of the bytes of "hello world":

I'm not sure what o_e_l_e_o's command does. To me, echo -n "hello world" | shasum -a 256 -0 is executed normally, but it gives another result:

Edit: -0 means that it reads in bits mode. So, I presume that it treats the input as binary, and converts it later to bytes to hash it.

Update:  I've installed both Debian and Kali for Windows and upgraded both distros.  That said when entering your command it seems as though the windows version of linux does not recognize shasum as the output states the following:

└─$ echo -n "hello world" | shasum -a 256 -0
-bash: shasum: command not found

Perhaps these versions don't include the shasum command?  Or perhaps the Windows versions don't?

Either way any suggestions on this issue or also any recommendations on any specific Linux distributions that can let me perform the above would be appreciated.  Thanks.

Hmm you all may end up forcing me into the world of Linux and python after all.  Either way I'm going to first try to enable to turning on Windows Subsystem for Linux just so I can try to run those commands as you mentioned.  I'll give this a try and report back.  Thanks!

I also don't use Windows, but a quick internet search seems that there is no obvious way to use Windows Powershell to compute the hash you need. If you were running Linux, then you just open terminal and enter the following very simple command:

Which will return the following output:

And then you take the fist character (9) and convert it to 1001 and append as your checksum.

Here's another open source tool you can use to input your coin flips and generate your seed phrase: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/handydandy-a-tool-to-work-with-entropy-5373505

Windows is very limited in using commands and stuff like that to compute hashes, etc. Linux is better. But in any case it is a lot better if you learn and use a programming language instead of trying to make it work with commands. Something like Python is easy to learn and you can use it for such purposes, not to mention there are many open source projects on github.com in python you can use.

Hey, no not yet. However the whole thing for me here is that I want to understand what's occurring in the background and how it happens so that I can learn for myself and be comfortable with what's going on and why.

If anyone out there can help me out with suggestions on what programs / commands I can use built in Windows offline that will allow me to convert my 128 bit entropy to a hexadecimal number and then also perform a SHA 256 on the hexadecimal output it would be very helpful. Thank you.

Have you tried out my software? You're not going to mess with hex values, hash functions and mnemonic standards at all. That's technical stuff that happens on the background. You'll just flip a coin, and submit the results. Once done, it'll return you your BIP39 seed phrase, as well as some addresses of every type (legacy, nested segwit, native segwit) with their responsive private keys.

Alternative to my software (and more reviewed): https://iancoleman.io/bip39/

Hi BlackHatCoiner / all,

I agree there are several software items I am trusting.  The trick I'm trying to pull off is minimizing my sphere of trust to only encompass the essentials and of course as you said avoid the RNG.  That said I'm only interested in performing the OS stuff relating to generating the BIP 39 in an offline machine that will never see the internet which should help reduce that trust further. 

As to what I'm ultimately trying to do is figure out exactly how best to take my own derived entropy that I create offline and then create a 12 word BIP 39.  To me it sounds like flipping a coin 128x or rolling dice is the way to go (at least for testing).  Where I get confused is once I have that 128 bits (ones and zeros) what exactly do I do in Windows to:

1) identify the Hex value for the 1s and 0s of the entropy (offline), and then

2) once I have the Hex value, how do I perform a SHA256 hash for this Hex value in windows (offline) in the hex value of the entropy so I can then convert the first value of this SHA256 digest value back to binary (first 4 bits) to get the checksum that I would need to append to the 128 bits of entropy.

TIA

Okay, but note that you do rely on lots of things that I'm not sure you're aware of. First of all, you rely on Microsoft. There's absolutely no way to prove that your OS won't betray you, unless Microsoft released the source code and let developers across the world confirm they haven't inserted a backdoor. Secondly, there's a higher chance that your OS has a 0-day, compared to Linux, because it isn't so broadly reviewed. Thirdly, you rely on software developers, cryptographers, and mathematicians.

But, yes. You do avoid the firmware RNG.

With coding. But since that's not your field, I recommend you to use my software. Otherwise, tell me exactly what you want to do. You might be a victim of an XY problem.

Again, please don't do this. It isn't secure, like, at all.

I wouldn't use dice at all. Dice are more prone to bias than coins, the bias takes longer to detect, and is also harder to detect. All of these things become more true the more faces your dice has. It would take hundreds of rolls to be relatively sure of detecting even a fairly large bias on a 16 sided dice. It will be simpler, quicker, and more secure to flip a coin 128 times.

Thank you again BlackHatCoiner.  I certainly appreciate all of your replies.  That said however I am not a coder and not presently looking to be one but rather someone who likes to tinker with bitcoin and is trying to get to the point where I can create my own entropy and generate my own BIP 39 seed word without any reliance on the available software that does it. The idea is that as a non coder that can't verify code independently (and even if I could, I am not an encryption expert to fully understand all the intricacies there).

That all said, I feel I'm right on the cusp of knowing how to build my own BIP 39 seed word list for use an offline wallet that uses this standard and PSBT files that is compatible with Bitcoin core.  In my mind this is probably one of the safest ways to transact with sovereignty and that's what I'd like to be able to achieve here.   I'm just getting stuck in a few areas being a non coder windows user.  I can easily create my own entropy and understand that I need to be able to figure out how to perform some of the steps that yo mentioned here:

"You don't hash the hexadecimal, and that's why you don't need to convert the binaries to hexadecimal. Hash functions take input as bytes. You need to convert your 128-bit string to bytes, and then hash that. It's just that most libraries do this conversion in the background, which brings some confusion."

As far as how to convert my 128 bit entropy to bytes, I understand that would mean just simply deconstructing it to 8 bit chunks.  However specifically how to structure those bytes into a file format that I can use a built in Windows tool. I think my method of execution is off as I was apparently wrong in saving the ones and zeros in a notepad.txt file format.  So if I understand you right, then what I need to do is somehow create a binary file of my entropy.  I'm wondering how I would go about that and that once it's done, how I would then structure the binary file to contain the bytes to be digestible by the SHA 256 hash function that I'm hoping is possible with a build in windows tool.

Thanks.