If someone has my Recovery Seed but does not have my password, will they be able to get in to my account?
Do you mean your Passphrase?
There’s no password connected to the seed. And there’s only a PIN code to login to the Trezor device if used.
If yes to the question above, it’s more difficult for the person with the seed to access your Hidden wallet but it depends on how weak your Passphrase is. (S)he can empty any funds in your Standard wallet at any time though.
You should move your funds out of the Trezor wallet(s), re-initialize your device with a new seed and set up a new Passphrase, then move your funds back to the new wallet.
I have a question regarding Passphrase.
If I secure my trezor wallet with passphrase and lose the trezor, when I import the seed word will it automatically recover the funds from the passphrase protected wallet?.
Secondly, I have read online that Trezor and Ledger seeds are compatible with each other, so if someone got hold of my seed and import that seed into Ledger then what happens?.
You can restore your funds in any wallet which supports BIP-39 standard and your coins, for example, you will not be able to restore TRX on Trezor Wallet because it doesn’t support it, but you can restore it on any other hardware wallet which is support this blockchain. If you want to restore your funds with passphrase in software wallets (strongly not recommended), you should use wallet with passphrase support, like “Unstoppable Crypto Wallet”. It can be usable if you have not big amount but your hardware wallet was damaged or lost and you need quickly send the funds. After you pasted your seed in software wallet, you should generate after the new seed in the hardware wallet to collect your crypto. Don’t trust any software wallet for hodl - on some day it can be compromissed.
Thank you for the tips but my question was about
- How to go about restoring a passphrase enabled trezor wallet in a new trezor.
- Can you restore the passphrase enabled trezor wallet in Ledger?.
the normal way. passphrase makes no difference for the restore operation.
yes
But will the passphrase protected hidden account in old Trezor pop-up automatically after importing the 24 word seed in the new Trezor?.
Also, Say later down the line if I want to move to ledger, will the new Ledger automatically import the all the hidden wallets which I created in Trezor after putting in the 24 word seed into it?. If yes then how to access it, will it also ask for passphrase to access that account?.
Listen, you’re looking at it the wrong way.
It seems to me that you’re imagining the hidden wallets as sort of “attachments” to the “main” account? You create a wallet, get a seed, create a hidden wallet, which gets attached to the seed, then create another one, and so on?
That is not how any of this works.
What we call a “wallet” is a combination of a seed and a passphrase. Like, in a mathematical sense, that is what a wallet is. There is no additional data, no server registration, no attachments. You can take your seed, add a passphrase to it, and you get a wallet.
(sure, there’s algorithms that take the seed + passphrase as an input, and produce the cryptographic keys and cryptocurrency addresses as output, which is how you do transactions. but all that comes out, reproducibly, out of the two pieces of data that constitute a wallet)
On a Trezor, your seed stays the same and you can choose a different passphrase any time. Not choosing any passphrase gives you a Standard wallet. Choosing a passphrase will give you a Hidden wallet associated with that passphrase. Nothing is “created” – the passphrase that you picked gets combined with your seed, and that yields a wallet.
With that in mind, I hope you can answer your own questions:
Obviously not. Importing the seed doesn’t tell you anything about the passphrases that can be combined with it. Any passphrase can be combined with it. It is up to you to add a “new” hidden wallet and enter the right passphrase.
(It’s the same as if you reinstalled your PC. The Suite will see the Trezor, but won’t remember any hidden wallets that you added previously.)
There is nothing that Ledger could “import”. You will, again, need to manually tell it to load up the particular hidden wallet that you care about.
That’s partially for Ledger support to answer – but yes, you will need to input the passphrase somehow, otherwise you can’t get the seed + passphrase combination that is your wallet.
To drive the point home:
The passphrase is not like a key to a locked box.
The passphrase is like knowing which locked box, out of trillions of possibilities, you want to open.
If you want to import a passphrase protected account somewhere, you have to use the passphrase to do it. Otherwise the information about “which box to open” is not there.
4 Likes
So does this mean if you forget what the passphrase is on a hidden wallet your fucked even if you have the seed?
Not ideal, I created a 3rd trezor wallet using rabby but when I go through the transaction I get the “transaction failed, address unknown” at the end point of transaction. Would this be because I’ve punched in the wrong passphrase when it pops up trezor suite?
doesn’t matter what you input in Suite if you’re using Rabby. but if you mean the generic Trezor pop-up then yes, that is very likely
Is there a way to brute force your way through? IE we know what the passphrase should be but its misspelt some way so can we try those combinations
There aren’t any limits on the passphrase attempts so you can just try as many times as you like.
If you are looking for an automated way to do it, it wouldn’t be difficult to write a Python script that tries various passphrases, fetches the Ethereum address, and compares it to a known one. However, due to abuse concerns I’m afraid that we can’t give out specific advice in this forum, so you will have to do your own research.
2 Likes
Thanks Matejcik I understand the concerns, does the trezor passphrase use the Bip39 standard?
if your seed type is BIP-39 (single backup) then yes
if your backup is SLIP-39, then the SLIP-39 passphrase is used
Whats the difference how will I know?
if you don’t know, you have bip-39 
it’s one set of 12 or 24 words
Shamir (SLIP-39) would be multiple shares of 20 words each.
1 Like
I would like to ask you for one clarification. It is always adviced do not store seed on the internet. Even though It is encrypted storage. But if the wallet is protected with passphrase, that is strong enough, is there a reason for such worries?
It seems user friendly to have seed in encrypted note on icloud and well remembered phassphrase. Or am I missing something? Thank you for your kind advice.
And how do you back up the passphrase?
Because if your backup is “I remember it”, then you are one unfortunate bump to the head away from losing all your coins.
Humans are not a good backup medium.
A passphrase that is memorable for a human has significantly less entropy than your seed. To get to 128 bits, you would need ten words from the EFF long list – which isn’t really all that different from the 12-word seed mnemonic. (That, or a blob of random letters, numbers, and special characters, which is certainly not going to be easy to remember, nor convenient to type into Trezor every time.)
In other words, by relying solely on the passphrase, you are lowering your overall security, or causing more inconvenience when using Trezor. Likely both.
With that said, in the real world, adversaries aren’t actually going to brute-force your passphrase on the off chance that it’s an easy one. Having any passphrase at all, even if it is “hello123”, buys you a huge advantage compared to people with no passphrase.
…and on the other hand, the people with no passphrase whose seed can’t be downloaded from iCloud are still pretty much just as secure as you 