Trezor Safe 3 repeating same seed words. Device defective

General topics
1

I am experiencing a serious issue with my Trezor Safe 3 during the wallet backup seed generation process.

For three consecutive attemps, the device displayed the same third word ( same initial letter) and the fouth word was identical across all attempts. This is mathematically impossible for a newly generated seed and suggest that device is repeating the same screen instead of advancing through the new seed generation process.

I have already tried the following troubleshooting steps:

Full device reset

Slow and firm button presses

Different USB port

This issue persists,so i suspect a hardware malfunction

Could you please assist me in diagnosing this problem or advise on replacement options?

Thank you,

Manfredi

2

Let me guess … the word is academic?

2 Likes
3

Yes ….how can it’s possibile ???What can I do ?

4

This is normal ? I need help to understand what can I do ….i don’t feel Safe have 2 same word, especcialy for 3 consecutive time when i did the reset. Someone can explain to me ??

5

Very simple answer: SLIP39 words are not all random.

SLIP39 encodes a bunch of useful info alongside your actual seed entropy. You won’t see this on a single-share backup, because then you just get academic academic for your 3rd and 4th words … yeah, turn’s out that is exactly what tells you there is only a single share.

If you use multi-share, or even SuperShamir, the words start to vary: e.g., the first 3 words are the same across all your shares – so that, if you find a bunch of papers in your drawer and some of them start with ocean marathon tackle ..., you know that those go together.

And your Trezor can pull out more info, such as how many shares you need to successfully recover.

This is in contrast to BIP39 which has no metadata at all, and that has a bunch of consequences that make it somewhat painful to work with (in developer terms, fortunately the users don’t care), and it also plays a role in why BIP39 checksum is so weak.

6

don’t worry about it, really.

Your backup has 20 words
Each word encodes 10 bits, for 200 bits total.
Out of that:

  • the first word is a random identifier
  • words 2, 3, 4 carry 30 bits of metadata
  • your seed entropy is 128 bits, + 2 zeroes to pad it out to 130 = 13 words
  • the remaining 3 words = 30 bits are checksum

No security is lost, the metadata is there in addition to the entropy data.