Advanced Recovery in Action!

Today, we are happy to announce the implementation of Jochen Hoenicke’s Advanced Recovery method into TREZOR Wallet user interface. This new recovery method will assure that no part of your seed will ever be revealed to your computer. As this was a highly requested feature by our community, we hope that you will fully enjoy it.

If your TREZOR device is up-to-date, there is no further action required from you. On the other hand, if you would like to try out this feature and have an outdated firmware, you will need to update to 1.4.2.

Advanced Recovery is an Advanced Feature Please make sure you have read through this guide before using this recovery method. The required firmware version is 1.4.2.

Not sure what “Recovery” is for? The recovery process restores your seed into your TREZOR, allowing you to use the same wallets and credentials as before. Check it out in our documentation!

How Safe is the Standard Recovery?

To check through all the combinations of a 24-word seed the attacker would have to run SHA-512 (24! ÷ 256 × 8096) 19 621 680 704 813 697 269 760 000 times.

Using the Standard Recovery, you have to enter your recovery seed into the TREZOR Wallet interface in a shuffled order in order to obfuscate the correct combination. Therefore, the Standard Recovery process is still very safe, as it is highly improbable for someone to access your wallet even despite knowing your seed out-of-order.

More information on Security Threats can be found in TREZOR Docs.

Introducing the Advanced Recovery

In contrast with the Standard Recovery, the Advanced Recovery completely obfuscates the letters entered on the computer. Instead of writing whole words in a shuffled order, you will be inputting individual letters on the PIN-pad in a regular order. The computer will never know what letter is being entered, as the layout of the PIN-pad constantly changes.

However, recognizing the possible steep learning-curve, the time required to use it and the safeness of the Standard Recovery process, the Advanced Recovery will not become the default option in TREZOR Wallet.

Detailed Guide through Advanced Recovery

Using the Advanced Recovery will require more time compared to the Standard Recovery method. Start by plugging in your uninitialized TREZOR into your computer, navigate to the TREZOR Wallet and select TREZOR Recovery.