Is it possible to hack or guess someone’s seed phrase?

In the era of rapidly developing quantum computing, some folks in the crypto community are wondering how significant this threat of quantum supremacy may be for cryptography. Vitalik Buterin often mentions Gnosys Safe Multisig in his speeches as one of the most reliable solutions for storing crypto assets.

Despite the fairly safe use of wallets whose phrase was generated by using 12 or 24 words, there are other more reliable solutions, especially for storing significant capital. We’ll talk about these solutions later, but we’ll look at the basics and reliability of a 12-word seed phrase for now.

There is a well-known BIP39 library, and this is a certain standard of the known 2048 words with the help of which the cryptographic generation of a public key and encryption of a private key occurs.

There is mathematics and possible combinations for both 12 and 24 words. And there are Gnosys Safe or Oryy wallets, smart contracts with multi-signatures that are not afraid of any quantum powers, mathematical accidents, or even the slightest chance of compromise. They are time-tested, open source, and used for cold storage by large crypto exchanges, funds, dexes, and many other more advanced users.

Returning to the seed phrases, I would immediately like to note that there are chances of picking it up, but they are incredibly tiny. If put, you can compare its random selection with winning the American National Lottery 4 times in a row, since to accidentally gain access to a wallet with a balance, you need to know more than just words, but also their order and the checksum which is formed by the last 12th or 24th check word.

For phrases of 12 words, the maximum possible number of combinations is (2048^11)(2048/(11-4)), resulting in: 777 788 267 247 859 345 059 141 959 844 041 626 185! 

For 24 words, respectively: (2048^23)(2048/(23-8)) and
1976 184 989 650 196 401 895 611 477 481 606 960 695 807 738 293 598 959 606 742 767 067 068 384 079 188 241!

These are huge numbers and quite reliable from the point of view of mathematics and probability theory. By the way, the chance of accidentally being destroyed by lightning is higher than the chance of guessing your mnemonic phrase. For those interested, there are other interesting statistical comparisons in this regard floating around the Internet. To summarize, it is theoretically possible to guess the phrase of your wallet, but in practice, it is very unlikely. For those of you who are interested in multi-signature smart contract wallets, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with tools such as Gnosys Safe and Oryy Safe from Ēnosys Global. Both use the same reliable and audited open-source that has long been known to the entire crypto community and, therefore, are great for 100% secure storage of your crypto assets.