[SOLVED]Seedless wallet still tells me private keys?

[Nancarrow]

Either this is a serious security issue or I've been badly misunderstanding what a 'seedless' wallet really is all this time.

In all my seedless wallets, I can right-click an address in the 'receiving' tab, select the 'Private key' menu option, and... it tells me the private key for that address, in wallet import format. Should it really be able to do that? I thought 'seedless' meant the same thing as 'watching only' which meant 'you can't spend from any of these addresses with this wallet because it doesn't have any of the private keys'?

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[Nancarrow]

I'm going to bed now. It's bedtime where I'm at. The lack of any posts for twelve hours... unnerves me. Somebody please explain how I'm an idiot by the time I wake up.

[JoelKatz]

How did you create these seedless wallets? You're supposed to create them using only your public key, so retrieving the private key from them should be impossible.

[Nancarrow]

Huh, still up.

In all cases I ran "electrum -w <walletname> deseed" from a terminal window (ubuntu)

I have no idea how the 'master public key' works.

ETA: and just to be clear, I realise that that command leaves the original wallet untouched and creates a new file <walletname>.seedless - it's the latter file that's displaying the behaviour I'm talking about.

[btcven]

Are you sure you selected restore from Master Public Key?

Are you running the latest version?

[TheButterZone]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=456688.0

[Nancarrow]

Are you sure you selected restore from Master Public Key?

Are you running the latest version?

No, I did it using the "deseed" command line option. BUT I have just tried it using the 'restore from mpk' way and it has the same result: I can still see the private keys. I'm using version 1.9 which I believe is the latest?


ETA: could someone just check if their electrum does the same thing? ie. use a seedless wallet, go to the receiving tab, right-click an address. Is there a menu option there to display the private key? Does it in fact do so? Can you verify that is the right private key for that address? For me it's 'yes' to all three questions. Am I right in thinking that this would be a serious flaw if it's replicated?

[Nancarrow]

Okay, I fixed it. It would appear this was a booboo in 1.9. Upgraded to 1.9.7 and all is well.

[btcven]

Okay, I fixed it. It would appear this was a booboo in 1.9. Upgraded to 1.9.7 and all is well.

Sometimes the new version notifier doesn't work properly, one should always update to the latest version to see if it fixes the issue