Study Says AI Can Guess Crypto Seed Phrases in 0.02 Seconds – Sort Of

Since we are almost at New Year’s eve, this post is a bit of a fun. AI knows all, right? 0.02 seconds, right? Well, not so fast.

NFTEvening and Storible collaborated on a test to see how fast AI can figure out your seed phrase.

First, what the heck is a seed phrase anyway? You use a seed KEY to sign your crypto transactions. it is a very long, pretty random string of characters that no one is going to remember. So the crypto world invented the concept of a Seed PHRASE to make it possible derive your seed key. A seed phrase is from 12 to 24 words, which, if entered correctly and in the correct order can be used to generate your seed key. So, if you memorize some phrase that is meaningful to you and is long enough, you can type it in (you don’t want your computer to remember it) to conduct crypto transaction.

OK, now what? The research used an AI technique called Long Short-Term Memory which excels at problems like these to estimate how long it would take to fill in the missing words.

Their neural network was trained for 30 days and then used to predict how long it would take to crack your seed phrase.

Assume you have a 12 word pass phrase and knew 11 out of the 12 words. It took the AI only 0.02 seconds to figure out the missing word.

This doesn’t seem like a very likely case. Now lets assume it had 10 out of the 12 words (still unlikely). Now it takes 29 seconds. Here is the whole table.

• one word missing – 0.0204 seconds
• two words missing – 28.98 seconds
• three words missing – 2.28 hours
• four words missing – 177.79 days
• five words missing – 892.82 years

So, unless the AI (or you) already has most of your pass phrase, it really isn’t useful. But lets continue anyway.

• six words missing – 1.85 million years
• seven words missing – 1.59 billion years
• eight words missing – 2.39 trillion years
• nine words missing – 18.2 quadrillion years
• ten words missing – 36.3 quintillion years
• eleven words missing – 59.5 sextillion years
• and if it has none of the words it would take 1.218 septillion years

Note that the time to calculate the seed phrase if it needs to find eight words out of the phrase is 174 times the age of the universe.

On the other hand, if it has all twelve words and just needs to figure out the correct order, that only took it 8 minutes.

So, at least for the foreseeable future, if you keep your seed phrase secret, you should be safe.

There are, of course, many ways to steal your crypto besides guessing your seed phrase. The simplest one might be to trick you into installing malicious crypto wallet software or other crypto software. Then they don’t have to calculate anything – all they have to do is wait for you to enter your seed phrase and then send it to the hackers.

So the moral of the story is keep your seed phrase to yourself and practice good cyber hygiene. Here are some cyber hygiene tips to consider. Credit: Hack Read

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