Topic: Passphrase of Death (Bounty in BTC) (Read 253 times)

Put a little bit of bitcoin on your non-passphrase protected account, but deposit a little more on the passphrase-protected one and store the same passphrase together with your seed. That way it looks you don't really know what you are dong. At the same time, the majority of your coins are on a different passphrase-protected account and that passphrase is written down and stored separately from the previously mentioned examples.   

DO THIS

That's not entirely true: this scenario still protects you against a $5 wrench attack: the password gives you plausible deniability if the Trezor also shows (much smaller) funds when used without password. But indeed, the password doesn't protect you against an attacker who finds your backup if it's on the same piece of paper.

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If Dave could find your password in a few hours, I'd say your password isn't strong enough.

Great that you managed to recover your coins! Some suggestions for moving forward:

Obviously your current wallet is no longer secure and you should move all your coins to a new wallet. You did well in backing up the seed phrase on three separate pieces of paper, but you should also back up your passphrase (if you choose to use one this time) on separate pieces of paper. There is no point backing up your seed phrase and passphrase on the same piece of paper, since then the passphrase is adding nothing. And as I said before, once you've created your new wallet/seed phrase/passphrase/back ups/etc., make a note of the first address in your new wallet, then reset your Trezor or delete your wallet file, recover from your written back ups, and check the first address is still the same. Only then, once you are confident your back ups are correct and complete, should you then send coins to that new wallet.

Glad you found help this quickly and got your coins back.

I partly blame Trezors UX for the issue. Giving first users such an easy access to something they might not be fully educated about yet and without the correct terminology being used. Makes it too easy to shoot oneself in the foot and getting confused. In my opinion and from watching beginners use hardware wallets for the first time, a passphrase should only be easily accessible to people who know that they’re looking for it and it should be clearly labeled as such. Will send them some feedback.

Luckily, everything ended on a happy note this time. I am curious though. Since Dave managed to recover the passphrase rather quickly, was the string that you used anything similar to what you originally thought it could be? How different was the password compared to what you thought it was and what you submitted to Dave? Did it have any special characters, numbers, capital and lower case character combinations, etc. I would just like to know what can be brute forced within a few hours.

I'd like to thank everyone for sharing their insights! They're all very much appreciated.

I'm very glad to come back here with actual findings and results as to what really happened. I will edit my original post accordingly, and hope that it will save others from going through the same thing.

After trying BTCRecover on my own and with the forum's suggestions, I failed to recover the password. I realized that it's beyond my knowledge and ability so I've decided to look for a wallet recovery service. I had my recovery seed phrase, and I made a password list of what I could have possibly entered as a passphrase (the same list I used for BTCRecover but apparently my configurations came up short). The service I used was Dave's WalletRecoveryServices and he managed to unlock the wallet in just a few hours. So to sum it up: I really did enter a passphrase and I just didn't remember or write it down because I thought I could recall it from memory--it was really a facepalm moment when I received the password from Dave. It wasn't a typo of any sort. It was not a Trezor firmware update issue/hardware issue. It really was just a grave human error, with a lot of carelessness and complacency. Never again. I hope.

Please don't forget your passphrase, or it can lead to an early, painful demise.

You might want to update your op with new information you've written below but just to clarify the things you know:
1. Addresses (I'm assuming it's not just txids and you know the addresses that belong to your wallet - or at least one).
2. Nmemonic
3. Pin

Do you also know what sort of password you've picked? As long as it's not a 13+ string of random alphanumeric characters, it might be crack able (even if it's the full 35 characters but made up of words). A lot of wallets do the generation stages slowly for randomness, the algorithms used to derive addresses are very fast in comparison.

Have you tried using the start of your nmemonic as the passphrase in case you were looking for something to test out the feature? Or a password you use in a lot of places.

Also did you generate the wallet with trezor software? Wallets like electrum didnt ask you to confirm your password in the past so there's a chance there could be a simple spelling mistake you've overlooked (even if you made it on trezor suite, you might be less likely to spot caps lock if it was enabled for both password inputs).

You said that between having the coins on your trezor and the loss of the coins you did a software update. You can try to set up your trezor from scratch and insert your seed phrase to see if it is some kind of software error.
Also you can insert the seed in a normal computer wallet but I don’t know which one is the right one for that kind of seed. Best would be to use an offline machine for that.

Just to confirm if you’ve actually used a passphrase or not. When you first set up your trezor, did you pick the "standard wallet" or "hidden wallet" option?

If you’ve picked the hidden wallet option, then it required you type in an additional line of text.

That is definitely warranted and this has changed how I look at securing things in general.

Thank you so much, that is such a generous offer. I am quite beaten down from trying and I am not confident enough that I'll be doing the right configurations since I wasn't able to crack it with my best-guesses password list. I've been thinking of reaching out to wallet recovery services, since I'm sure they're much more equipped and knowledgable than myself.

I appreciate this is maybe rubbing salt in the wound, but for future, after you generate a new seed phrase and back it up, you should note down the first address in the wallet you have created before wiping/resetting everything and recovering from your written down back up, to ensure you made no mistakes and you can indeed regain access to the same wallet.

In which case, if it is definitely the correct seed phrase, and you've tried accessing it via Electrum at all the possible derivation paths, then it does indeed seem as if you have mistakenly set a passphrase.

I have a lot of experience using btcrecover, so can talk you through creating a tokenlist file to widen your search if it comes to that.

Yes, thank you for that suggestion. I'll try those different derivation paths since I've already set up BTCRecover.

Embarrassingly, yes this is the only time I'm accessing the wallet again after initially setting it up and transferring funds into it. I didn't feel the need to test a restore prior to transferring funds as the set up had to make me enter the recovery twice.

I'm 100% certain that it's the right seed. I've only used it that one time. I've only gone through the setup once, so I only ever generated one set of recovery seed, which I had written down on three sheets of paper.

Correct.

You could also try other standard derivation paths, such as m/44'/0'/0' and m/49'/0'/0' just in case your Trezor Suite really did something weird.

Is this the only time you have tried to access the wallet? Have you tried to access it and been successful previously? And I take it you never tested your restore process prior to sending funds to the wallet in the first place?

How certain are you that your seed phrase is correct? There is no chance that you could have reset the Trezor or generated a second seed phrase at some point?

It would generate the base wallet. BIP39 turns your seed phrase in to your root seed number by using your seed phrase and a salt in 2048 rounds of HMAC-SHA512. The salt is the word "mnemonic" concatenated with any passphrase you choose. If you don't set a passphrase, it just uses the word "mnemonic". So if you turned on the passphrase function, but then didn't enter a passphrase, it would again just use the word "mnemonic" concatenated with nothing and therefore generate the base seed-phrase-only wallet.

I like this, and it's entirely possible that someone not that familiar with the terminology could mistake a passphrase for a password that protects access to the software. OP even said he didn't know about passphrases at the time of the setup and only found out about them by doing research for the issues he is currently experiencing.

Trying out common passwords you usually set (assuming you are using the same or similar password combinations) might help. What would happen if he started the passphrase generation, noticed something was off, but added a passphrase by mistake without entering a single character? Is that even doable?

Sorry, what I meant is that I had 8 different transactions made to my Trezor wallet, and all with different addresses--Trezor gives me a fresh one after using the previous. You're right--I did not see a list of them like you can in Electrum.

Yes, I am 100% certain about having the correct seed as it is the only set I've ever generated from my Trezor. I have tried to uninstall, reinstall, open it on another computer, and have restored it to factory settings, but to no avail. Also, please tell me if this makes sense, if the Trezor firmware update messed it up, wouldn't restoring it to a different wallet (in Electrum, Exodus) show the funds if they were really there?


Yes, I think after all the troubleshooting, it leaves me with entering a passphrase and just don't remember doing it. I've tried the usual passwords, scoured through my saved passwords, tried variations of them, using a space, but they all report an empty wallet.
I tried opening it with Electrum and Exodus, both by connecting the hardware wallet and by using recovery seed phrase. Both show me nothing.

Before coming here, I used BTCRecover with any and all passwords that I could think of, all the typo configurations that it offered (at least, all that I knew how to utilize). I tried both with the standard --bip39 configuration and other test runs using the derivation path m/84'/0'/0' but only incremented it up to m/84'/0'/1', I could run it again and do as you suggested. Thanks very much everyone for your insight and patience.

Right, so assuming everything you have said is accurate - set up Trezor, sent coins to it, saw the coins on it, next time you plugged it in the coins were missing, seed phrase is correctly backed up, seed phrase is correct on the Trezor with the check seed function - then it does indeed seem you have the correct seed phrase but have opened the wrong wallet.

There are three possibilities here. The first is you set a passphrase and do not remember doing so. A passphrase can be any combination of letters, numbers, or symbols. Perhaps you mistakenly thought you were setting a password for your Trezor Suite software. You could try any common passwords you frequently use, or you could also just try " " (i.e. a space) in case you did something like this by mistake. Your next option would be attempt to bruteforce the passphrase using software such as btcrecover, but if you have absolutely no idea what the passphrase is and it is anything more than a few characters, you will never find it unforunately.

The second possibility is that you have somehow ended up on the incorrect derivation path. I've not used Trezor Suite in years, so I don't know if this is possible, but for this I would pair your Trezor with Electrum and cycle through common derivation paths to see if you find anything. The standard derivation path for bc1q addresses is m/84'/0'/0'. I would try m/84'/0'/1' and keep incrementing the last number a few times to see if you find anything.

The third possibility I'm not sure about, but you said you used change addresses? It might be that Trezor Suite is not displaying the change addresses since you haven't used the receiving addresses yet. If you open your Trezor with Electrum, that should solve that issue.

I would explorer the latter two options first since they can be resolved/excluded in a few minutes, whereas bruteforcing a passphrase could take years.

I am a bit confused when you say you used change addresses. Did you transfer your coins to normal receiving addresses on your Trezor or to change addresses? It's the first time I hear about change addresses being displayed on a Trezor or Ledger software. You can see them in Electrum, but not in the native hardware wallet apps if I am not mistaken.

Maybe your firmware update messed something up. Again, I am unfamiliar with the workings of a Trezor and the "check seed phrase feature", but since you are certain you have the correct seed written down in multiple places, you could try to uninstall and reinstall the Trezor Suite and reset your hardware wallet to factory settings. After that, use the backup from seed feature, enter the correct seed, and see if that will bring everything back to normal.

Hi, sorry about the lack of information outright.

Yes, that's correct so far. A year ago I set up my Trezor, generated the seed, created a PIN, did a test transfer, and proceeded to transfer more (used change addresses generated by the wallet, around 7 tx). Before I closed everything and disconnected my Trezor, I looked at my Trezor Suite dashboard for a considerable amount of time and it was displaying all the coins and transfers I have made correctly.


Three weeks ago, I needed to take some funds from the wallet. I updated the firmware since I figured it's been almost a year since I've used the desktop suite. What happened next is I plug in my Trezor, successfully entered my PIN on the first try, and I am greeted with an empty dashboard. There is nothing on it, no balance, no transactions, no activity at all. Yes, the coins are still unspent and in the same addresses I transfered them to--I have a watch-only wallet for them.

Once I realize that my funds are lost, I immediately went to check my seedphrase if I'm on the right wallet or if my data has been wiped. I went through the check seed function of the Trezor, and it's the same exact seed as the one I had initially saved. It's on three different sheets of paper that I have written the seed on, and they all match, and it's the same seed that was loaded onto my Trezor.

In addition to this, I restored my wallet on Electrum and Exodus using my seed phrase, and I found nothing.

I only ever found out about hidden wallets and passphrase when I read up on the support page and forums of Trezor. The general message I got from all the things I read there is if the seed is right and your funds are not there, it's not the right wallet.

No, you can't make that conclusion. Answer my questions from the previous post and tell the entire story please. A passphrase creates a totally different set of addresses, which would require you to move your coins from your non-passphrase protected addresses to the new passphrase-protected ones. Therefore, it can't be that you transferred your coins to a standard BTC address and then all of a sudden the coins went from there into a passphrase-protected addy or the software asks you for a passphrase. Unless there is a horrible bug we haven't seen or heard about before.

I am not a Trezor user, but I am pretty sure that the software isn't going to tell you: hey, you have a passphrase-protected account. Can you please enter your passphrase now! How did you reach the conclusion that it's a problem with passphrases and not something else? 

This! You're on the tech board, so provide more technical details and less bounty talk.

If you never entered a hidden wallet password, there is no hidden wallet. That means something else went wrong, so you may be looking in the wrong direction. There's no point brute-forcing something that doesn't exist.

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Start from the beginning: what happened to your Trezor, what happened to your seed phrase (obviously don't post it here)?