Seed phrase bruteforce options

[Biceps]

Hello guys!

Long story short. I was stupid enough to write down only 11 words out of 12 of the seed phrase. They were generated automatically, so I suppose they were taken from BIP39 dictionary. At least all 11 words I know are from there. I was using Phantom wallet and trying to recover it there. Right now doing manually, but it's quite a time consuming activity and therefore not very effective.

So I know the 11 words and their order. One word in between them is missing and I don't know on which place this word is.

Are there any ways to automate the process of seed phrase checking? It was a solana wallet, so the wallet to check those words into could be solana compatible.

I am not a programmer, so writing a python application (or similar) and making it work is not an option for me. I'm looking for a solution, than does not require programming skills.

Any help will be appreciated.

[Cricktor]

As Phantom wallet, I never used it, appears to be BIP39 compatible, it should be no big deal to brute-force the missing word in between your known sequence of 11 words.

The last word of mnemonic recovery words according to BIP39 standard, embeds a checksum. When you say, some word in between is missing and the missing word position is unknown, there should be a rather limited amount of possible solutions.

I haven't done this for other coins than Bitcoin, but I assume it should be possible to brute-force the missing word with BTCrecover which can also handle Solana. If you know an address of your wallet, the better!

See here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You may need to make yourself familiar with the tool. If you know nothing about derivation path and HD wallets, then maybe learn about it at https://learnmeabitcoin.com. You can learn such wallet basics with no issue in the context of Bitcoin, even when your wallet was one with Solana.


I would also recommend to prepare a test case. Create a 12-word BIP39 recovery backup e.g. with iancoleman script. Get an address of that wallet (iancoleman script doesn't support Solana, take some coin that BTCrecover and iancoleman support). Choose a word in between to be the missing one, but you know the solution.

Check if you can recover this word and verify it with the known solution. If you fail with this test case, you likely won't succeed with your real case.

[nc50lc]

I am not a programmer, so writing a python application (or similar) and making it work is not an option for me. I'm looking for a solution, than does not require programming skills.

3rdIteration's BTCRecover fork supports Solana and it can be given a different derivation path in case Phantom wallet isn't using the default.
But with SOL, it requires some dependencies from "requirements-full.txt" to work so use it instead of "requirements.txt" when installing BTCRecover's dependencies.
Link to BTCRecover: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover (documentation in the reply above)

I am not a programmer, so writing a python application (or similar) and making it work is not an option for me. I'm looking for a solution, than does not require programming skills.

Read the documentation and make BTCRecover work,
Then try to describe this better or make an example using "word1" ... "word12" texts instead of the actual words:

So I know the 11 words and their order. One word in between them is missing and I don't know on which place this word is.

[Biceps]

Thank you, I will study these materials and try to do the tests.

[Biceps]

Thank you for responses, this solution worked out for me. It had some bugs, but on app developer youtube channel are videos on how to deal with them, when you are trying to recover Solana. Wallet is successfully restored.

[Mia Chloe]

I still don't really understand the reason why people end of making mistakes with their seed phrases. Nevertheless op you should also get to know that aside from the fact that it's a 12 word seed, it could be either a BIP-39 seed like you mentioned or also a Standard ELECTRUM seed like in most cases. Nevertheless note that they both have different word lists so applying a brute forcing script would also need you to pick the right word list.
Nevertheless the the longer time it would take to brute force the seed phrase is because you don't have the exact position of the last missing word else it would be a lot easier and faster.

[notocactus]

I still don't really understand the reason why people end of making mistakes with their seed phrases.

It's mostly because they did not back up their wallet mnemonic seed, or back it up with bad methods, or back it up inaccurately, and they missed /ignored a vital step:

• Testing their backup for wallet recovery.

Without this vital step, you never know that whether their wallet mnemonic seed backup is correct and useable for wallet recovery.

How to back up a seed phrase?
With whatever backup methods, they must do this step

Test Your Backup

Regardless of which backup scheme you choose, if you don't actually do a test run of restoring a wallet from it, you can't be confident that it will work when you actually need it.

How should you go about testing your backup?

• Create a new wallet.
• Create your seed phrase backups.
• Deposit a small amount of funds into the wallet, like $10 or $20 worth.
• If possible, create a new wallet with a different name, otherwise delete your current wallet.
• Initialize the new wallet using your seed phrase backup, make sure the funds appear in the wallet, and that you can spend them.

[nc50lc]

I still don't really understand the reason why people end of making mistakes with their seed phrases.

The issue in in that wallet's wallet creation process. (and ofc, human error)

He mentioned that he's using "Phantom Wallet" which only asks if the user backed-up the displayed seed phrase (with a check box) during wallet creation without
actually confirming if the user copied the correct words like other wallets would do.

Usually Electrum, Sparrow or other wallets forces the user to retype the seed phrase after that "backup your seed phrase" part.
With that, the backup will surely restore the correct wallet since it's cross-checked with the one saved in the wallet.
But Phantom Wallet will just proceed to normal wallet operation after ticking that "I saved my Secret Recovery Phrase" box to continue.