Enhancing The Security Of The Bitcoin Wallet Master Seed

Abstract

Bitcoin cryptocurrency is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It is largely used for financial transactions on the Internet. Bitcoin has gained popularity due to its anonymity, privacy, and comparatively low transaction cost. Nevertheless, the use of Bitcoin as an emerging technology comes with challenges and various types of threats are associated with its use.However, the Bitcoin wallets security are one of the salient challenges. In a Bitcoin wallet, the user's funds are protected by Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) private keys. The wallet generats these keys from a secure master seed of 512 random bits.Thus as a result, the Bitcoin wallet became a desirable target for attacks such as dictionary attacks. To avoid such attacks, the master seeds must be sufficiently long and have a very high level of entropy in which several currently used the Bitcoin wallets lack . In this paper, our aim is to enhance the security of the master seed of the Brain wallet achieving through introduction of additional entropy source, a Unicode model with no fixed ASCII code. Finally, the findings of this paper prove that the proposed encoding model ensured the resistance of the secure master seed generations against the dictionary attack.