Recovery Passphrase

[kingmaker]

Hi Guys,

One of my clients, forgot his passphrase. He remembers 8 out of 12 words.

Is there anyway to recover the wallet access?



Regards,

[bitbollo]

Hi,
your client remember the words in the same order?why he remember only 8/12?

These words come out from a dictionary? other libraries?

Because there is the remote possibility, to brute force and try to get all combinations... but it's a matter of years find the right passphrase. It depends the amount is not worth time/effort/money to try this.
and if there is just a special character (I hope he can remind about that), or a number inside the passphrase it's impossible found out

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.

[Lucius]

In case your client is lost 4 words from seed chances for brute-force them and get correct seed exist, but with today's computers it probably would have lasted for years. Best chance in this case would be if your client is have backup of his wallet (files), or if he / she still has some chances to find the lost words.

Of course it all depends from type of wallet, and since you did not wrote no details about that all comes down to speculations.

[aplistir]

If you do not know from which places the words are missing, or the order of the words, it is unlikely you will be able to recover the addresses.

However, if you know that it is the last 4 words that are missing and the order of the first eight is correct, then it is possible to recover everything.

[bob123]

Whether it is recoverable with 8 of 12 words depends on two things:

• Are the positions of the missing words known ?
• Is the Order of the 8 words known ?

If you know the position of the missing words AND the position / order of the known 8 words is correct -> It is possible.
If you know the position of the missing words, but the order of the 8 known words is unknown -> Not possible.
If you do NOT know the position of the missing words, but know the order of the 8 known words -> Should be possible (didn't calculate yet).

We can give you a definite answer after you reply to these 2 questions (Order of 8 words known? / Position of missing words known?)

[vit05]

I believe he probably split the passphrase and saved it in different places. This is a demonstration that this method is not the best way to save a seed or passphrase. It is extremely risky, since recovering requires a very long brute force work. Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme is best in these situations.

[Lucius]

bob123, based on this case where user is lost 5 from 24 words of his seed, HCP is calculated that some 20 years more or less would be necessary to get valid seed + some extra work after that. Since this is only 12 word seed, can we assume that time to recover this seed would be at least a half less then in mentioned case?

On one hand it is good to know that it is extremely difficult to crack seed, even if most of seed words are known. But this is for sure bad news for anyone who finds himself in a situation that part of seed is lost, and there is no other way to access wallet.

[keychainX]

Hi Guys,

One of my clients, forgot his passphrase. He remembers 8 out of 12 words.

Is there anyway to recover the wallet access?



Regards,

Yes you can, there are several tools on github. You can start with this
https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Seedrecover_Quick_Start_Guide.md

sources are here

https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover

If you  need more help let me know, I have recovered several wallets like this

/KX

[bob123]

bob123, based on this case where user is lost 5 from 24 words of his seed, HCP is calculated that some 20 years more or less would be necessary to get valid seed + some extra work after that. Since this is only 12 word seed, can we assume that time to recover this seed would be at least a half less then in mentioned case?

Whether it is a 12- or 24- word mnemonic code doesn't matter, i think.
It matters how many combination you have to try out, and this is dependent on the amount of missing words.

Since the base character set is 2048, the difference between guessing 4 compared to 5 words should be 2048 times less time consuming.
Which would mean that it should take 240 (months in 20 years) / 2048 = ~ 0.12 months. So about 3,5 days (given that 20 years for 5 words is the correct amount of time).


But the 20 years were calculated according to this:

Still even at 5 seconds for 1,000,000 mnemonics...

This might not be the actual time it takes. I currently don't know how many mnemonics are possible per second on which machine.

So it additionally depends on the machine from OP and the program / algorithm used.


My calculation above obviously assumes that all known words are in the correct order and the position of the missing words are known.

[HCP]

The speed of recovery is also dependent on the user knowing an address (or addresses) that was generated from the seed mnemonic... without that, you'd need to start generating addresses and doing blockchain lookups to see if they were "used" etc which can be quite slow compared with simply generating an address and comparing to a given value.

But yes, 4 missing words is significantly easier to find that 5 missing words... the time required on fairly "average" hardware should be measured in days, as opposed to years.

[djhomeschool]

You can try to contact the people at https://walletrecoveryservices.com/
They have a very good reputation and have had some good success

[zenrog]

Guys do I have any chance to recover my second password?
I have a wallet.aes.json file backup from blockchain.info (from 2013), I know first password, but I forgot second, I know about which might be but I do not know the exact variation, 12 phrase word is lost too.

[TryNinja]

Guys do I have any chance to recover my second password?
I have a wallet.aes.json file backup from blockchain.info (from 2013), I know first password, but I forgot second, I know about which might be but I do not know the exact variation, 12 phrase word is lost too.

Unfortunately, not. At least not without trying to brute force the password (which is extremely hard/impossible if you don't have enough information about it).

[bob123]

I have a wallet.aes.json file backup from blockchain.info (from 2013), I know first password, but I forgot second, I know about which might be but I do not know the exact variation, 12 phrase word is lost too.

If you know how it should look like, but just don't know the exact variation, bruteforcing should be doable in a reasonable amount of time.

What exactly are you missing in your variation ?
Do you know the amount of character ? Are you just missing a few one ?
Is it about upper / lower case letters ? Are you looking for a permutation of your characters ?

[zenrog]

Yeah its about some upper/lower case letter something like this - TodayIsTuesday2019 so I'm missing upper case letter or variation - IsItTuesdayToday2019...

Which app you are recommending for brute force? And is it possible to brute force second password on MultiBit/Blockchain.info with that app?

Thanks.

[BitMaxz]

Which app you are recommending for brute force? And is it possible to brute force second password on MultiBit/Blockchain.info with that app?

Thanks.

What you need is already mention above you can use the BTCrecovery tool to bruteforce the password of Multibit but I don't if it will work on Blockchain because their wallet is not the same as before but you can try.

Follow this tutorial on recovering your password for both multibit and blockchain from here Complete tutorial on recovering a password.

[koch44]

Guys do I have any chance to recover my second password?
I have a wallet.aes.json file backup from blockchain.info (from 2013), I know first password, but I forgot second, I know about which might be but I do not know the exact variation, 12 phrase word is lost too.

You can brute force it or ask a service to do it for you.

Let  me know if you need guidance

Koch44

[bob123]

Yeah its about some upper/lower case letter something like this - TodayIsTuesday2019 so I'm missing upper case letter or variation - IsItTuesdayToday2019...

Which app you are recommending for brute force? And is it possible to brute force second password on MultiBit/Blockchain.info with that app?

Thanks.

In this case, btcrecover should find the correct passphrase in a very short amount of time.

For x letter in your password, it needs to check 2^x variations.
With 10 letter, there are 1024 possibilities (which is a really low number for bruteforcing). This would probably run through in less than 5 seconds.

You just need to properly configure the token file.
If you need further help in configuring it, feel free to ask for assistance.


Also.. please do not talk to 'helpful newbies'. Most of them (if not all) are scammer:

Let  me know if you need guidance

Koch44

[Theb]

I wouldn't even bother recovering my account if I forgot 4 out of the 12 words in my passphrase in that's around 20-40+ characters to guess my passphrases are and let us not forget it should be in order which I think your client doesn't even know what words should come first. This is one of the hard parts on not having a backup on your passphrases because 12 word aren't easily remembered by mind, your client should have copied it on a piece of paper or somewhere he will store it offline.

[HCP]

I wouldn't even bother recovering my account if I forgot 4 out of the 12 words in my passphrase in that's around 20-40+ characters to guess...

What are you talking about? The missing 4 words out of a 12 word seed mnemonic is relatively easy to bruteforce using seedrecovery (part of btcrecover package). You don't need to try and guess 20-40+ characters... you're guessing whole words from a known list of 2048 words. That is the same as guessing "4" characters (from an alphabet of 2048 characters).