aezeed-recover

README

aezeed-recover

Recover wrong or missing words from an aezeed mnemonic.

Overview

aezeed-recover does not need an internet connection, and works well on a 80x24 standard terminal, i.e. on your node or a primitive device for the very purpose of recovery.

• Currently, recovery is limited to 2 missing or a single wrong word
• Replacements and insertions are tried at any position
• Password recovery is not supported, yet

(see TODO for upcoming features)

If you need additional help recovering your seed, please contact recovery@mustwork.de.

Similar Projects

• btcrecover written in python by gurnec
• bip39-solver-cpu written in rust by johncantrell97
• bip39-solver-gpu written in rust by dessy888
• Seed Savior written in javascript by ZenGo-X
• walletsrecovery.org overview of custom derivation paths of different wallet implementations

Installation

Download the appropriate binary from releases, or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/mustwork/aezeed-recover.git
cd aezeed-recover
go install

Running

Either run the binary directly, or execute aezeed-recover if installed with go install. Make sure ~/go/bin/ is on your $PATH.

Dev Mode

Running with the --dev flag will enable random seed generation and other options.

DO NOT USE THE GENERATED MNEMONIC FOR REAL FUNDS.

Known Issues

• skipping through seed words with arrow keys occasionally activates drop down unintentionally
• when skipping through seed words with arrows, the cursor is not always positioned at the end of the word
• on the info splash screen the confirmation button is disabled initially, although the entire text is visible
• pasting should NOT wrap around into password field
• pasting non-alpha characters should not be possible
• when leaving password field with ESC, the seed is not reevaluated
• pasting from clipboard on linux and windows is untested

TODO

improve brute force by limiting realm

The amount of missing/wrong words can be increased significantly by considering more detailed knowledge of the seed. If parts of the seed are definite, the search space is vastly reduced. Possible improvements:

• mark certain words as fixed
• allow prefixes as given
• allow suffixes as given
• consider placeholders or a regex like DSL

See btcrecover.

improve brute force by trying more likely mistakes first

The following assumptions should be honoured:

• adjacent words ar more likely to be mistaken than distant words
• mistakes are made more likely towards the end of the mnemonic

BIP39 support

Also recovering BIP39 seeds is desirable.

BIP39 only has a 4 bit checksum, as opposed to aezeed's 4 bytes. Hence, brute forcing missing or wrong words requires knowledge of an address, its derivation path, as well as access to a transaction index (a node).

find swapped words and columns

Another possible cause of error is swapping or rotating the mnemonic when writing it down, i.e. columns are mistaken for rows.

• check for swaps along all symmetrical rotations, i.e. swap words between columns if a column contains 2,3,4,6,8,12 words

Donation

BTC: bc1qfkv06pjcgq280f42nu66ktdfeer7f06lmtgerp

License

MIT

Author

Markus Rother

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