LION ATE MONK: Human-Readable Encryption Keys

Recovering a private key from a phrase

And so we create encryption keys, and then … wait for it … we protect them with a password. It is truly a crazy system to take a 128-bit encryption, and then apply a password which reduces the actual security of the key to just tens of bits. If there’s around 1 billion passwords possible, then the equivalent key size is just 30 bits, and which is easily crackable by a standard PC.

So, you have a cryptocurrency wallet, and it will have to support a private key, of which a public key can be automatically generated from it (using elliptic curve methods). And you are just ready to cash-out and now need your private key. But just as you are about to open your wallet, your computer crashes, and there’s nothing you can do to get your private key back. You have your public key, and ask security professionals if they can generate your private key from your public key, but they just shake their heads.

So you did manage to write the hex values of your key down, so you create a new wallet with the key, but it just doesn’t work. There’s something wrong with the way you wrote it down.

Well the solution is for us to write down a text form of your key— there are risks of course with this — and put it in a safe. But if it is in a hexadecimal…