Fix your mnemonic seed with AnuBitux
For many reasons, it could happen that we do not have access to our complete mnemonic seed. For instance, we could have written it by hand too quickly and now we are not able to read it anymore, or we could have hidden it in many places and we are not able to find part of it, or we have written it on paper and it is not completely readable anymore, etc.
With AnuBitux we can try to solve this issue with seedrecover.py, a tool that comes with btcrecover.py. To start it we only need to type seedrecover.py in our Terminal. It has a very simple to use graphical user interface and we only need to answer the prompted question and skip the unavailable information.
Let's check out how it works in a couple of use cases. For the examples we are going to use the following seed, obtained with the Ian Coleman's BIP39 tool.
Case 1: missing words
Let's hypothesize that we have only the first ten words of our seed:
rigid cool hire tiny kingdom inner evidence brown fee airport
First of all let's start our tool.
The tool asks us if we have a wallet file related to our mnemonic seed, but this is not our case so let's skip this question by clicking on the "Cancel" button.
Now we need to choose the kind of wallet we are going to recover, in our case a Bitcoin wallet with BIP39-based words.
The tool only supports BIP44-derived addresses. This information will be used further by the tool because it will check if the seed is correct by comparing many derived addresses with the one we have to provide. If our seed has been used with a multicurrency wallet like Exodus or Coinomi, we can choose a coin from which we know at least one public address derived from the seed we are trying to recover.
In the next step, the tool is going to ask us if we know a master key of our wallet, but this is not our case, so let's skip this step by clicking on the "Cancel" button.
Now we can provide at least one address derived from our mnemonic seed.
It is important to provide addresses obtained with a BIP44 derivation path. This path is commonly used by all the currency but coins like Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc, also support other derivation paths like BIP49 and BIP84.
Now the tool asks us to decide how many addresses we want to be checked for each possible mnemonic seed. If we know the address we have provided is one of the firsts derived, we can provide a low number like 10. Unless so, the tool could take longer to check a lot of possible mnemonic seeds.
Finally, we have to provide the part of the mnemonic seed we have available.
Now we can click on the "OK" button and wait until the tool tries to find the correct mnemonic seed.
After a while, the tool will be able to provide us the correct seed.
Case 2: wrong words
Let's now hypothesize we have all the 12 words of our mnemonic seed but for some reason, we are not able to read one of them. So, instead of having the seed
rigid cool hire tiny kingdom inner evidence brown fee airport grant orient
we have
rigid cool hive tiny kingdom inner evidence brown fee airport grant orient
In this case, we can follow the same steps we have seed above and, when the tool asks us to enter the best guess for our mnemonic seed, we can insert this sequence of words.
In this case, in a few seconds, the tool is able to provide us the correct mnemonic seed!
Final thoughts
We have seen some simple applications of this tool but, of course, it could also perform harder tasks. For example, it could fix a mnemonic seed with both missing and wrong words. It is important that we do not know only the mnemonic seed we are trying to fix but also at least one other piece of information like our extended public key, one or more addresses or the wallet file the seed is related to. We also need to know the correct derivation path used with the mnemonic seed.
