Regenerating Entropy Grids

Deterministic grid recreation

The Entropy Grid Generator provides the option - when creating your Entropy Grid - to choose Deterministic entropy. By using 128-bits of entropy in the creation of these grids (the same level used when generating 12-word Bitcoin seed backups with 128 coin flips or 50 dice rolls) we have the ability to simultaneously generate 12-word Recovery Phrases that gives a plain text backup. Recovery Phrases are automatically added to the bottom of Deterministic Entropy Grids during generation.

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An example of a 12-word Grid Recovery Phrase. You don't have to use this Recovery Phrase, but the option is there if you want to

NOTE: All 12-word Recovery Phrases are valid BIP39 Mnemonic sentences. This gives you extra options for deploying decoy funds on the resulting wallet or just to have nothing at all on those. Even in the latter case, an attacker may spend money and resources trying to brute force your passphrase on a seed phrase that looks like it should have funds but only unlocks your Entropy Grid.

The provision of Recovery Phrase may at first glance seem counter-intuitive to the concept of Border Wallets - afterall, we are giving users the ability to memorise seed words, not find new ways of writing new ones down!

However, some users may find value in having the option to make hand-written or digital copies of regeneration words in some circumstances - for example, if you decide to lodge a copy of an Entropy Grid with a 3rd party for safe-keeping, e.g. a sibling, parent, child, etc. then giving them a 12 word Recovery Phrase (which looks like a Bitcoin seed word backup, but has no funds) instead of a full copy of your Entropy Grid adds an additional level of security.

12 words which behave like a Bitcoin seed phrase but isn’t used as one is potentially a very useful decoy.

Having 12 words as a representation for an Entropy Grid instead of a PDF file may also open up more options for users to store the keys to their grids.

NB: Recovery is only available with Deterministric Entropy Grids.

Maximum Entropy Grids use 19580-bits of entropy - with this supracosmic-level of randomness, it is not possible to offer regenerative recovery phrases. Maximum Entropy Grids therefore need to be stored securely once generated.

Regenerating a Deterministic Grid

Let’s test it.

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The top part of the Entropy Grid generated using the 12 words in the image at the top

These are the top 5 rows x 16 columns generated by the following Recovery Phrase:

crawl coin twenty truth ahead layer file add taxi amazing diary cup

Let’s walk through how we regenerate it using the EGG’s Regenerate feature.

Using the Regenerate feature

  1. Open borderwallets.html. Navigate to the “Regenerate” tab.

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You are given a field to enter a Recovery Phrase, and select the type of grid that it is expected to generat.

Here you will see a field presented for you to enter a Recovery Phrase. Go ahead and input the 12-word Recovery Phrase above or your own one.

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Your grid will be regenerated and placed in your dowwnloads folder. In the case above, the same words in the top 5 rows that we saw earlier and regenerated

Check your downloads. That’s it. You have regenerated a Deterministic Entropy Grid.

Now let’s look at Encryption.