2021-05-13
How to use seeds and mnemonic words to achieve the security needs of wallets
As the Bitcoin wallet technology has matured, some common industry standards have emerged, making Bitcoin wallets widely interoperable, easy to use, safe and flexible. These commonly used standards are: These standards may change or become obsolete with development, but now they form a set of interlocking technologies, which have become the de facto wallet standards for Bitcoin. These standards have been adopted by a wide range of software and hardware Bitcoin wallets, making all these wallets interoperable. Users can export the mnemonics generated on one of the wallets and import them into another wallet to restore all transactions, keys and addresses.
Sallet one wallet has a powerful mechanism for managing multiple keys and addresses. Generating seeds from a series of English words is a standardized method, so it is easy to transfer, export and import in the wallet. If the Sallet one wallet is combined with this method, it will be more useful. These English words are called mnemonic words, and the standard is defined by BIP-39. Today, most Bitcoin wallets (and other cryptocurrency wallets) use this standard and can use interoperable mnemonics to import and export seeds for backup and recovery.
Since the length of the private key is 64 bits, the readability is weak, it is troublesome to copy by hand, and there is a risk of theft when backing up to the computer. Therefore, smart wallet vendors invented mnemonic words, using special algorithms to convert a 64-bit private key into a dozen or even twenty English words.
Generation principle: randomly generate a 128-258 bit number called entropy; entropy obtains a value through SHA256 hashing, take the first few bits (entropy length/32), and record it as y; entropy and y form a new sequence, The new sequence has 11 bits as a part, and a dictionary of 2048 words has been defined in advance to correspond, and the generated sequenced word group is the mnemonic word.
The private key and the mnemonic can be converted to each other, so the mnemonic is another embodiment of the private key. At present, many wallets have adopted the method of mnemonic backup. Many users have encountered wallet thefts due to irregular mnemonic storage methods, such as screenshots of mnemonics or saving them to the computer. The correct way to save is to copy the mnemonic words onto paper and save them; or you can use some encryption methods to split the mnemonic words and save them in different places to enhance security.
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