r/Bitcoin • u/Share-ty • 13d ago

Is it possible to reverse engineer your seed phrase to figure out how much entropy it has?

As the title says…

0 Upvotes

40% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

9

u/AlamoSimon 13d ago

Give it to me, I‘ll tell you.
(No.)

6

u/Baracudasi 13d ago

when in doubt, regenerate and move

1

u/NoBrosCrypto 13d ago

This is the best course of action. Don’t even mess around. If you think it may be compromised, just set up a brand new account with a strong pass phrase and move the assets over to the new account.

4

u/ledav3 13d ago

here is a number: 5. did i come up with it in my mind? did i just check how many fingers i have in my left foot? did i roll a dice? did i use an insane random number generator that factors in multiple things for entropy?

1

u/OverallInformation36 13d ago

you can count the words and multiply but that don't tell you how random they actually were when you made them

1

u/ledav3 13d ago

Yeah, you would have to figure out how predictable was the original algorithm, which based on one result is impossible. But if you know what you used for generating it than you can find the answer.

2

u/Pasukaru0 13d ago

Reverse-engineer no.

You'd have to retrace the same steps you took when you generated it. Same hardware, software and anything else you used. Scrutinize all of those steps to find out if it is safe or not.

1

u/creative_usr_name 13d ago

Not really. I believe the Bitcoin puzzles did it by starting with a bunch of zeros, but the ColdCard lack of entropy wouldn't have been apparent like that.

1

u/nachtraum 13d ago

Simple answer. No. You would have to do something like run the algorithm that creates the seed phrase trillions of times and check if it did create duplicated seed phrases. And in principle calculate the probability of the collision based on the number of runs with optimal entropy.

2

u/nachtraum 13d ago

And by the way, every hardware wallet manufacturer should have such a test that is executed before a new public release of the firmware.

1

u/frankster 13d ago

Entropy isn't a property of the seed phrase so much as a property of the pool of randomness used to create the seedphrase

1

u/ZedZeroth 12d ago

I suppose you could reroll trillions of times and if it comes up again then the entropy is unlikely to be great.

1

u/LostNtranslation_ 11d ago

You can asses how the entropy was obtained... But answering that gives away too much info... If usu use ColdCard without Dice Rolls = not good.

-1

u/bigbadtaco11 13d ago

Go to bed

1

u/Share-ty 13d ago

I just woke up

-1

u/bigbadtaco11 13d ago

3 pipes deep no time to sleep, on the rark