This document describes the Seed Version System used in Electrum (version 2.0 and higher).
Electrum derives its private keys and addresses from a seed phrase made of natural language words. Starting with version 2.0, Electrum seed phrases include a version number, whose purpose is to indicate which derivation should be followed in order to derive private keys and addresses.
In order to eliminate the dependency on a fixed wordlist, the master private key and the version number are both obtained by hashes of the UTF8 normalized seed phrase. The version number is obtained by looking at the first bits of:
hmac_sha_512("Seed version", seed_phrase)The version number is also used to check seed integrity; in order to be correct, a seed phrase must produce a registered version number.
Early versions of Electrum (before 2.0) used a bidirectional encoding between seed phrase and entropy. This type of encoding requires a fixed wordlist. This means that future versions of Electrum must ship with the exact same wordlist, in order to be able to read old seed phrases.
BIP39 was introduced two years after Electrum. BIP39 seeds include a checksum, in order to help users figure out typing errors. However, BIP39 suffers the same shortcomings as early Electrum seed phrases:
- A fixed wordlist is still required. Following our recommendation, BIP39 authors decided to derive keys and addresses in a way that does not depend on the wordlist. However, BIP39 still requires the wordlist in order to compute its checksum, which is plainly inconsistent, and defeats the purpose of our recommendation. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that BIP39 proposes to create one wordlist per language. This threatens the portability of BIP39 seed phrases.
- BIP39 seed phrases do not include a version number. This means that software should always know how to generate keys and addresses. BIP43 suggests that wallet software will try various existing derivation schemes within the BIP32 framework. This is extremely inefficient and rests on the assumption that future wallets will support all previously accepted derivation methods. If, in the future, a wallet developer decides not to implement a particular derivation method because it is deprecated, then the software will not be able to detect that the corresponding seed phrases are not supported, and it will return an empty wallet instead. This threatens users funds.
For these reasons, Electrum does not generate BIP39 seeds. Starting with version 2.0, Electrum uses the following Seed Version System, which addresses these issues.
Electrum 2.0 derives keys and addresses from a hash of the UTF8 normalized seed phrase with no dependency on a fixed wordlist. This means that the wordlist can differ between wallets while the seed remains portable, and that future wallet implementations will not need today's wordlists in order to be able to decode the seeds created today. This reduces the cost of forward compatibility.
The version number is a prefix of a hash derived from the seed phrase. The length of the prefix is a multiple of 4 bits. The prefix is computed as follows:
def version_number(seed_phrase):
# normalize seed
normalized = prepare_seed(seed_phrase)
# compute hash
h = hmac_sha_512("Seed version", normalized)
# use hex encoding, because prefix length is a multiple of 4 bits
s = h.encode('hex')
# the length of the prefix is written on the first 4 bits
# for example, the prefix '101' is of length 4*3 bits = 4*(1+2)
length = int(s[0]) + 2
# read the prefix
prefix = s[0:length]
# return version number
return hex(int(prefix, 16))The normalization function (prepare_seed) removes all but one space between words. It also removes diacritics, and it removes spaces between Asian CJK characters.
The following version numbers are used for Electrum seeds.
| Number | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0x01 | Standard | P2PKH and Multisig P2SH wallets |
| 0x100 | Segwit | Segwit: P2WPKH and P2WSH wallets |
| 0x101 | 2FA | Two-factor authenticated wallets |
In addition, the version bytes of master public/private keys indicate what type of output script should be used, and on which network. The prefixes are detailed here.
When the seed phrase is hashed during seed generation, the resulting hash must begin with the correct version number prefix. This is achieved by enumerating a nonce and re-hashing the seed phrase until the desired version number is created. This requirement does not decrease the security of the seed (up to the cost of key stretching, that might be required to generate the private keys).
Electrum currently use the same wordlist as BIP39 (2048 words). A typical seed has 12 words, which results in 132 bits of entropy in the choice of the seed.
Following BIP39, 2048 iterations of key stretching are added for the generation of the master private key. In terms of hashes, this is equivalent to adding an extra 11 bits of security to the seed (2048=2^11).
From the point of view of an attacker, the constraint added by imposing a prefix to the seed version hash does not decrease the entropy of the seed, because there is no knowledge gained on the seed phrase. The attacker still needs to enumerate and test 2^n candidate seed phrases, where n is the number of bits of entropy used to generate the seed.
However, the test made by the attacker will return faster if the candidate seed is not a valid seed, because the attacker does not need to generate the key. This means that the imposed prefix reduces the strength of key stretching.
Let n denote the number of entropy bits of the seed, and m the number of bits of difficulty added by key stretching: m = log2(stretching_iterations). Let k denote the length of the prefix, in bits.
On each iteration of the attack, the probability of obtaining a valid seed is p = 2^-k
The number of hashes required to test a candidate seed is: p * (1+2^m) + (1-p)*1 = 1 + 2^(m-k)
Therefore, the cost of an attack is: 2^n * (1 + 2^(m-k))
This can be approximated as 2^(n + m - k) if m>k and as 2^n otherwise.
With the standard values currently used in Electrum, we obtain: 2^(132 + 11 - 8) = 2^135. This means that a standard Electrum seed is equivalent, in terms of hashes, to 135 bits of entropy.