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.

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  )

 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.

adaseb,

Your math is more or less within the right order of magnitude, but is missing a few things.

First, you need SHA512, not SHA256.

Next, for each seed you try, you need to check its "checksum" with HMAC-SHA512, so that's 2x SHA512's, not one.

1 in 256 of the seeds you try will pass the checksum step above, and with these you'll need to run PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 with 2048 iterations (and each iteration requires 2x SHA512's) to get the xprv. This means on average, you'll need another 16x SHA512's per seed tried (so your initial estimate was 18x too small).

Once you have a potential xprv, you still need to check if it's in use. This means deriving a bunch of private keys from the xprv (let's say we derive 30ish keys on both the internal and external chains, using both BIP32 and BIP44 style paths). Now we're looking at 120+ EC operations per seed which passes the checksum step (on average 1 EC operation for every 2 seeds you initially try). There is also another HMAC-SHA512, SHA256, and RIPEMD operation per address that's generated.

Finally, we need a whole bunch of CAMs to look up (in parallel) these addresses in the UTXO set (which has about 43M entries today). I'm not sure how big CAMs get these days, but I can say that a 43M-entry cam is at least 10x or 20x bigger than anything commonly used in networking gear.

We can shift some things around a bit (generate fewer private keys/addresses, but search in the every-address-every-used set which is 10x bigger), but it remains a daunting task.

Of course, if we have this theoretical hardware mentioned above that can do silly-fast EC operations, it makes a lot more sense to just choose a public key visible on the blockchain which has a large UTXO value and attack it directly (which would take only on the order of 2^128 EC operations). In any case, it seems pretty likely it would take longer than current the age of the universe to succeed--personally I'm not that patient.

So yes, "12 worded seeds [are] really secure from Brute force".

Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly.

Surely a human-created pass phrase is very likely to be weaker than a randomly-generated private key, but a sufficiently long randomly-generated pass phrase (such as a seed created by Electrum, assuming a non-broken OS) is not any weaker than any private key.

In other words, for a 256-bit EC curve, a seed with 128 bits of entropy which generates a private key with just as much entropy is as strong as a private key with more than 128 bits of entropy since the weakest link is the curve itself (reversing an exponentiation takes on the order of "just" 2^128 EC operations even when the private key has more than 128 bits of entropy).

Do you mean a seed could be used as an alternative for a UUID? I suppose, they both "encode" 128 bits of data minus a checksum (for seeds) or a small header (for UUIDs), except that UUIDs are designed more to be convenient for machines, whereas seeds are for humans.

Actually, the "Random UUID probability of duplicates" on Wikipedia is quite relevant for seeds too.

Hi Jonald. Good to see you here after a long time. The PBKDF2 thing was introduced with version 2.0:

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/9285a7198ee1f19571d10453db1b708fc6306e9a/lib/mnemonic.py#L127

This approach was originally proposed by the bip39 standard.

I try to brute force electrum wallet i find some wallet with simple seed like
1_"1b" i find in this wallet 0.7 BTC
2_"above above above above above above above above above above above above " I FIND 1mBTC
3_"ghost ghost ghost ghost" I find in this  seeds 0.72 mBTC
My priv8 mind to brute force Looool
Try my methode

With 10 out of 12 words you reduce the possible (theoretical amount of) combinations to 2048² = 4.194.304
Checking this amount is definetely possible in a short amount of time.
Considering that the last word 'contains' a checksum, the actual amount of combinations is lower than 4.194.304, making it even easier to bruteforce them.

With 10 words exposed you should definetely regard your seed as compromised and switch as soon as possible.

You can bruteforce your seed with btcrecover (https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Seedrecover_Quick_Start_Guide.md).
There is a small guide published.

It is important to know which wallet you have used with your seed. Depending on the wallet you probably have to set the correct derivation path manually.
But it is definetely possible to creack your seed within a short timeframe.

But do not disclose your 10 words to anyone!


Feel free to ask further questions if you need any help with running the script.