At the end of this post I have copy/pasted BIPS.txt:
- A 14.8KB file containing all the words used for creating master-seeds.
- 2048 words (2^11)
- 11068 characters
At any time feel free to scroll down and take a look at it.
I was going to paste it at the beginning here but I figured 2048 lines would be annoying.
In any case
These words are very important. They are used on many many different networks to secure cryptocurrency. To give the extent of how much we trust these words, let me plug in my Trezor.
As we can see, even the old version of the Trezor hardware wallet supports dozens of coins. In fact, because it supports Ethereum via MyEtherWallet, it in turn supports hundreds of ERC-20 tokens.
My point here is that these 12, 18, or 24 words are all that stand in the way of anyone looking to gain access to our funds. They can be used as the foundation to create a secure wallet across hundreds of chains. I view this BIPS standard as the first widespread example of crypto interoperability. It's a pretty big deal.
Graphene
We can even use these BIPS words to generate seeds on Graphene based technologies (Bitshares/EOS/Steem/Golos/Hive/Blurt). Graphene allows us to use any string of characters as a master seed, therefore, we could pick the same seed for our Graphene accounts as we have for our Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts.
Why is this important?
Account security will be the prevailing top-priority issue going forward as we head into mainstream adoption. I can't tell you how many times I've been nervous about losing my money.
- If you lose your keys, your money is gone.
- If you send money to the wrong address: gone.
- If your security fails: gone.
When you are your own bank, security is the number one priority. The best way to secure decentralized digital assets is unironically using decentralized tactics. This means you have to delegate trust to as many places as possible for a maximum hedge factor. This means trusting centralized exchanges with a small amount, having funds secured by physical paper/metal; some of your money should be secured on the cloud encrypted; and some keys should even be memorized by heart.
Memorization
This is the focus of my post. I believe we can create a system that makes it much easier to straight up memorize a BIPS seed so it never appears anywhere except inside your own memory banks (brain). Would I recommend storing all your money using a seed you've memorized? Of course not! However, this tool would have several advantages to anyone who achieved it.
Imagine being able to sit down at any computer with an internet connection or even pick up anyone's phone and being able to have access to your own bank instantly! This is the advantage to memorizing a BIPS seed. If you were ever in a bind and needed money on demand, you'd have it. Anytime, anywhere. Borderless. In addition, if you were never in such a bind, your key would never be exposed to the internet ever, making it way more secure.
I've been thinking about ways to achieve this.
Not only would this be a good way to decentralize assets and have access to funds anywhere, but it could also get around our need to trust a "random" algorithm to generate our master seed for us.
What happens when you download a crypto wallet and start using it? A seemingly random key pops up on the screen and we just assume that is a trustworthy secure source for our own personal bank. Is it really though?
I would say it isn't.
So not only is my goal to help people memorize BIPS master-seeds, it is also to generate that master-seed without the use of an algorithm that could be compromised. How do we accomplish this?
Logistics for memorization
The more ways you experience information, the easier it is to memorize. This means hearing the words, saying them aloud, looking at them, writing them down. Unfortunately you can't smell or taste words... I guess you could touch them if you knew braille :D
Which words we use also matter. Certain words will be easier to remember for certain people. Certain combinations of words will also be easier to remember for certain people. Take this master seed for example that I just came up with off the top of my head while scrolling through the BIPS list:
miracle acid melt unfair social media unhappy mother move supreme neural network
I created this master-seed with @acidyo in mind.
I imagine this would be a pretty easy one to remember for him (and anyone really).
Reduced security?
What we are doing here is obviously reducing the security of BIPS by creating certain combinations of words, but I don't think it matters that much. Considering Trezor thinks it's okay to just scramble the order and add fake words on potentially compromised machines, the security that I'm proposing here is far better than that.
Worst case scenario
Someone creates an AI that's really good and guessing common words and combinations people use during this process of proof-of-brain master-seed creation. It manages to hack a few passwords of extremely weak accounts. What we have to remember here, is that it's also harder to hack an account like this depending on how one uses the master-seed.
Master-seed usage relative to security.
If you happened to create an easily guessable 12-word master seed, would it get hacked? Maybe not. It depends on how you use that seed. If you used that seed to create a Hive account, the AI probably wouldn't figure it out, because the seed is used in combination with the username. What are the odds that the AI happens to check this master-seed in combination with your Hive username and generates the public key and tries to match it to your public key?
That's a lot of processing power to try to hack an account that might not have much money to steal in the first place (considering powering up and account recovery). Also it implies that this AI has access to a Hive node (and every other node it is hacking). And I'm not talking normal access, I'm talking about the kind of unfettered access one would need to have all the information on site without having to ask for data over a laggy internet connection. They'd have to be running their own nodes and have their brute force algorithm connected directly to them physically on-site.
On the flipside, say you are using the master-seed to store Bitcoin. However, you know your master-seed might be a little bit easier to guess, so you don't use the first 10 wallets generated by the seed. Instead, you leave the first 10 wallets blank with no money and no transactions on the chain. Now the AI that cracked your code would have to check 11 addresses in to even realize it had hacked you.
This is extra processing power would probably never be implemented because it would make the brute-forcing much slower. 10 addresses not enough? Use the 1000th address; use the 10000th address. See what I'm saying? If you do it right, even an easily guessable master-seed will not be cracked. In fact, instead of picking the number, you could just tell your offline device to spend all processing power for say 100 seconds and to use that wallet. Then a brute force algorithm that was trying to hack you would have to use that much processing power for every combination they think you might be using.
That security tangent took way too long!
But I guess it's an important preface to include for why I think we can trust what comes next. I want to get all these 2048 words into a database. I want to categorize every word, and create a frontend app for offline Raspberry-Pi devices that help users create their own seed phrase in a proof-of-brain style manner so they can be easily memorized. This way of generating master-seeds would make it impossible to hack the 'random' algorithm (because the algorithm is your brain).
Example Categories
- noun, verb, adjective
- relationships, plant, animal, violence
- time, emotion, product, machine
- positive, negative, sound
- number, food, weapon, sneaky
- valuable, fantasy, etc.
These are possible keywords I could add to the BIPS words in order to create a frontend that helps us find words and word-combinations that we would remember. Do you like weapons and hate your mother in law?
execute mother law knife gun hospital
It's quite easy to remember clusters of 6 words strung out in a certain way. Once we memorize 2 of these word clusters we have enough to create a full 12-word master key. Once we memorize 4 word clusters we could use them to create a monster 24-word key and even use them to create six (4 choose 2) 12-word key combinations. In this context, once you memorized 4 clusters your main cold-storage wallet would be all 24 words, while you could make several hot-wallets using other combinations. More likely you'd just create one hot-wallet as to not expose your other 12 words.
It's also important to note that even if you can't remember the order of the words, as long as you can remember what they are you could easily use this program to hack your own key and figure it out (because 12! factorial is only half a billion combinations for a 12 word seed). Computers are fast.
Acronym option
Need more help remembering your master-seed or afraid you'll forget it if you don't write it down? Acronyms can be a great tool. By using a 6-letter word to represent your 6-word cluster it will be easier to remember. Take this acronym for example:
SANTAS HELPER
save amazing noble tribe another solution hero exist lock police enemy rebel
Now you can write the words santa's helper wherever knowing full well no one is going to realize that is actually the key to you remembering how you store your assets. Even if they did, hacking the correct word combination is highly unlikely. What are the odds that someone who finds clues to your key actually has the resources to crack the code? Spoiler alert: It's near zero; even for law-enforcement.
The Problem
The biggest issue I've run into on this front is that you aren't allowed to use any combination of 12 words you want. The vast majority of word combinations seem to produce an invalid seed. I don't know what the rules are for creating these seeds, so I'll have to figure it out eventually and adjust accordingly. If anyone has any information on this front, do tell. I'll go ahead and put a 10 Hive bounty on it. Higher roller.
Take the above SANTAS HELPER key above.
I just downloaded MyEtherWallet to my phone just to test it out... Let's type in the words and see if it works. 90%+ chance that it doesn't.... and it doesn't work. So again, I'm not really sure how the rules for these master keys fully operate yet, but I'll figure it out and modify my strategy accordingly. It probably has something to do with the word's order in the list, as these words might not actually technically be words, but rather converted into their associated index value:
For example: "trip" might not be "trip" on the technical side of things.
It might just be "1863" (technically position [1862] if they are stored in a hash starting at 0). This would be represented by 0x746 in hexadecimal, so perhaps it has something to do with that.
Conclusion
While not an acceptable form of security to trust with 100% of our assets, I believe memorizing BIPS keys will become common-place and hope to be a part of the standard of how this is achieved. The obvious solution will be to use an offline device that can be wiped later that helps the user not only create a valid Master-seed but also remember it using various techniques. It should even be able to help users hack their own key should they forget it exactly but still have a lot of the pertinent information (like acronyms, knowing all words, associated public key, etc). Should be interesting.
BIPS.txt
abandon ability able about above absent absorb abstract absurd abuse access accident account accuse achieve acid acoustic acquire across act action actor actress actual adapt add addict address adjust admit adult advance advice aerobic affair afford afraid again age agent agree ahead aim air airport aisle alarm album alcohol alert alien all alley allow almost alone alpha already also alter always amateur amazing among amount amused analyst anchor ancient anger angle angry animal ankle announce annual another answer antenna antique anxiety any apart apology appear apple approve april arch arctic area arena argue arm armed armor army around arrange arrest arrive arrow art artefact artist artwork ask aspect assault asset assist assume asthma athlete atom attack attend attitude attract auction audit august aunt author auto autumn average avocado avoid awake aware away awesome awful awkward axis baby bachelor bacon badge bag balance balcony ball bamboo banana banner bar barely bargain 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Ha, check out word 1532
satoshi
Talk about words that don't belong :D That's a bit on the nose. Every other word is a basic one from the dictionary. I'll let it slide.
Return from Proof-of-Brain BIPS Master-Seed Generator to edicted's Web3 Blog
