26
votes
How to generate a seed safely?
What is my seed?
Think about your seed as the combined username and password that grants access to your bank account. If anyone obtains your seed, they can login and access your funds.
Seed: You ...
- 3,135
18
votes
Accepted
Can a node steal my seed?
No, a node cannot steal your seed
When you send a transaction to the node you are connected to, you don't send the seed to it. The tx (=transaction) gets created locally on your PC/Smartphone/other ...
- 4,454
18
votes
Accepted
What's the difference between a private key and a seed?
The Private/Public key pair (aka asymetric cryptography) refers to a common cryptographic mechanism. Private and public keys are bounds together and also bound to a particular well known cryptographic ...
- 5,344
13
votes
Accepted
How can I safely store my IOTA seed?
For digital storage, I would recommend using an offline password manager such as Keepass which can encrypt your key behind a password.
For paper storage, it may be good to print out a copy of your ...
- 3,135
13
votes
Accepted
Why are there just nines in the seed?
You want to have 27 unique symbols due to ternary computing. The Latin alphabet only provides 26. Some numbers like 0 or 1 might look like letters (O or L). Besides that they could have picked any ...
- 1,293
12
votes
Accepted
Why aren't seeds longer than 81 trytes more secure?
IOTA uses 81-tryte (243-trit) addresses. We assume that 81-tryte seeds (shorter seeds can be considered as 81-tryte seeds after being padded with "9") map to 81-tryte addresses uniformly and hence ...
- 1,540
12
votes
Sending seeds to someone securely
Never send your seed over the network, just explain to your friend how to generate it's own seed securely offline. Ask him one address and transfer the iotas.
Securing transfer is one of the main ...
- 5,344
12
votes
Accepted
Address re-use and snapshot
You should never send iota to an address that was already spent. This will make it possible for an attacker to steal your iotas. This rule is uninfluenced by any snapshot.
The problem after a ...
- 791
11
votes
Accepted
From which address money is being sent if I have money on more than 1 address?
First of all, there seems to be a misconception in your question. If you spend 2 iotas from an address with 10 iotas, that address will not then contain 8 iotas, the address will actually be empty and ...
- 1,358
10
votes
Accepted
How are addresses calculated from the seed?
First, a subseed is derived from the seed
Treat the seed as a (little-endian) number and add the index to it (a seed starting FEDCBA... and an index of 1 therefore results in GEDCBA....
Hash the ...
mihi♦
- 7,324
9
votes
How do I generate a wallet from a seed?
Dice may not be best. IOTA Seeds are made up of A-Z and the number 9, and are 81 characters long. So you need a 27 sided dice, or need to do a LOT of dice rolls.
Once you come up with a seed, ...
- 3,135
8
votes
Accepted
Do I Have to Change My Seed after Multiple Transactions?
It's safe to keep your seed. Even if you double-spend or reuse your address, your seed doesn't get exposed, only the private key of one address of your seed is partially revealed. You can generate an ...
- 4,454
7
votes
How can I safely store my IOTA seed?
What works best for me is storing the seed encrypted in a KeePass database file (or the offline password manager of your choice) on my computer and on an USB-Stick in another place (backup in case of ...
- 4,454
7
votes
Accepted
What happens to my money if my phone is damaged?
Your IOTA are not stored on your phone, they are stored on the decentralized tangle. Your seed is your password to access your IOTA, anytime, anywhere. As long as you have your seed saved in a place ...
- 3,135
7
votes
Accepted
Can I see my balance without logging in?
The balance is not stored on the seed but on the addresses created from your seed.
So if you want to see your balance, you just need to know the addresses.
You can either look your balance up in ...
- 4,454
6
votes
How to generate a seed safely?
IOTA's development team has explicitly recommended only two seed generation methods. They are:
/dev/urandom (available on Linux/MaxOS)
Keepass' password generator
The first option may be too ...
- 374
6
votes
Accepted
Secure Way to Copy & Paste Seed into Desktop Wallet
Depending on how thorough the malware is, following could work:
don't save the last/first/middle part of your seed in your pw (=password) manager, memorize it and just manually put it in
save the ...
- 4,454
6
votes
Accepted
If I increment the first tryte of Seed A to obtain Seed B, why does Seed B retain some of the spent addresses of Seed A in it's history?
Every new address is generated by incrementing a seed and doing some hashing. This gives a useful feature: If you don't want to see the whole history of the transfers then increment the seed before ...
- 1,540
6
votes
Accepted
Difficulty of cracking the seed based on checksum?
The checksum of an IOTA address or seed is formed by hashing that value and then using 9 trytes (or 3 in the case of the wallet seed) of the hashed value. Meanwhile, generating an address from a seed ...
- 1,358
6
votes
What's the difference between a private key and a seed?
The Seed is your only local stored authentification and is never revealed in a transaction.
Private Key's are generated with your seed in combination with a key index and are needed to sign the ...
- 123
6
votes
Accepted
What is the chance that a supercomputer finds a Seed with money
The probability of finding a special seed is 27^81 = 8.71 * 10^115.
If we assume that there are 1 trillion seeds, the probability of finding a seed with a balance is 8.71 * 10^103 .
If we assume ...
- 84
6
votes
Accepted
Is it more secure to use VPN client?
A VPN don't protect you about a keylogger.
I don't see a useful case to use a vpn to protect your seed.
If you fear keylogger, Virtualbox or any other Virtualmachine Software can help you.
Also a ...
- 804
5
votes
Accepted
Lost or wrong jotted seed - is it possible to withdraw IOTA?
No, if you have no access to the seed, it is impossible to obtain the funds. That is why doing what you did (sending test amounts) is a good habit.
- 3,135
5
votes
Secure Way to Copy & Paste Seed into Desktop Wallet
Use Keepass, and activate two channel obfuscation, then change "Override the defaut sequence" to {PASSWORD} only. Then use CRTL + V to use the auto-type function of Keepass.
This will make it harder ...
- 363
5
votes
Accepted
Why is logging into the seed so slow?
It has been observed that the more addresses in your wallet, the longer it takes for your computer to retrieve all associated addresses from the Tangle.
The new wallet should remedy this -- it will ...
- 3,135
5
votes
How many addresses do I have to reattach after a snapshot?
tl;dr version: In order to find your entire balance after a snapshot, you will need to attach the same number of addresses as you had before the snapshot.
Wait a sec, why do I even have to attach ...
- 1,320
5
votes
Accepted
Limit on number of addresses generated for one seed
An address is generated from 3 inputs :
a seed
a security level: 1, 2 or 3
an index : an integer
In theory an integer can be infinite, in computer science things are often finite. In java integer ...
- 5,344
5
votes
Accepted
Ever need new seed?
No you don't ever need a new seed when you follow the present best practices.
The only reason to need a new seed is if you lose your old one or if your seed gets compromised—as in someone else knows ...
- 1,293
5
votes
Accepted
How is the association between a seed and its addresses implemented?
An address is generated from a private key.
A private key is generated from any random 81 trytes (e.g. a seed)
If you want to know how this generating works in detail, you should look at the ...
- 4,454
4
votes
How do I generate a wallet from a seed?
Download the Iota Wallet for Desktop from -> https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases
Get the "IOTA.Wallet.Setup.2.5.4.exe" (or newer)
After you install it this is what you see. In the "SEED" ...
- 445
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible