Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP- & SLIP-0039 -- better multi-language support

[Natanael <natanael.l@gmail.com>]

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Den mån 19 nov. 2018 21:21 skrev Steven Hatzakis via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>:

> Hi Weiji, and Everyone,
>
> I think this is an important topic so sharing my two cents in case in
> helps: It makes sense for users to know that they can't merely just
> translate a word from one language into another and expect the same
> underlying entropy to be mapped, as the wordlists are not the same (i.e.
> words differ at the same index values across languages).
>
> However, while the words for each language cannot translate directly to
> their equivalent in another language, in terms of entropy (bits), the
> underlying entropy is, in fact, the same, when comparing mnemonics
> generated across languages (see English/Spanish comparison below) when
> sourced from the same initial entropy.
>
> Importantly, the entropy is a pre-image of the resulting mnemonic and
> doesn't change as the language changes, where the only changes are to the
> resulting words which depend on the language chosen, for a given entropy
> string. Ideally, the wallet/software should deal with these nuances, I
> don't think the protocol needs any revision (except for how the BIP39 seed
> is derived, perhaps), even if someone made up their own wordlist, as long
> as the wallet/software has a copy of it to map those words to the
> underlying index values, it's *those underlying index values and the
> entropy they map too is what really matters**. *
>
> I fully support the idea for users to back up this pre-image (initial
> entropy) as it can also be used to check the validity of the mnemonic and
> check that it mapped correctly, see Ian Coleman's BIP39 tool which shows
> index values, a feature that I proposed last year and was since
> implemented. Below is an example of how two mnemonics generated with the
> same entropy will produce different BIP39 seeds.
>
> * Example initial entropy of 128 bits +4 bit checksum derived from hash of
> byte array: *
>
> 10001101000 01010100100 11011010000 11100001101 01010001101 00010010001
> 01100000010 10101110100 00100100011 11110000111 01100011010 1100010 (+1110
> checksum)
>
> *In English*: minimum fee sure ticket faculty banana gate purse caught
> valley globe shift
>
> The same initial entropy above (all 132 bits) produces this mnemonic:
>
> *In Spanish*: mercado faja soledad tarea evadir aries gafas peine búho
> tumor gerente reja
>
> And the underlying index values below are the same for both the English
> and Spanish mnemonics above:
>
> Word Indexes: 1128, 676, 1744, 1805, 653, 145, 770, 1396, 291, 1927, 794,
> 1582
>
> *ISSUE AT HAND*:  While the initial entropy is the same, and word indexes
> the same for a given entropy, (i.e. same pre-image), the resulting BIP39
> seed is not the same when comparing the above English mnemonic with its
> Spanish counterpart:
>
>    - *English BIP39 seed:*
>    ce7618075099c89e986f18dc495daa3be190450ed07bef77d4334a54dbc1cd7e205797ffed2615ac0999a5d691f65bf316e2cdbfd2c9d7d90b03e77ff1e6a6f5
>    - *Spanish BIP39 seed*:
>    9f164de0fb09af51b5831886e424d6d2479d49b5e5a1b28f5c09467ea36089b144cd94bb9b636b3c27ccff96a8958e5b7ce43cf1dea81423fc66fa7fef0aea2c
>
>
> *Option 1:* Without changing anything in terms of the entropy
> generation/mapping process in the BIP39 spec, the wallet/client-side
> software would ideally recognize the language and show the corresponding
> index value per wordlist, and reverse-calculate the entropy and then re-map
> it to the language selected.
>
> *Option 2*: Perhaps a revision is needed to how the BIP39 seed is
> generated in the first place, such as by hashing the entropy instead of the
> words. Any thoughts on how viable that could be where the initial entropy
> is fed into the PBKDF2 function and not the words?
>
> *Closing thoughts and tiny checksum nitpick: *
>
>       - The multiple BIP39 seeds per language lend some similarities to
> BIP44 multi-account, so perhaps this can be an advantage, depends on how it
> is applied in UI/UX's (compared to having one BIP39 seed regardless of
> language, for a given initial entropy).
>       - There is perhaps an opportunity to add greater detail to the BIP39
> spec in terms of standards/best-practices for computing checksum values, as
> some software may be hashing bits, versus hashing bytes, or hashing the
> entropy as a hex string, etc.. for a given entropy, which will result in
> different checksum values for the same "valid" mnemonic, that might not be
> "valid" in another wallet which may format the data differently before
> hashing to compute the checksum.
>

This probably wouldn't work as a drop-in replacement, but having the
identifier of the chosen wordlist be part of the mnemonic might work?
Perhaps the raw seed would then be [hash of chosen dictionary]+[sequence of
word indexes].

The user experience then involves always selecting a dictionary by name. I
also suggest maintaining an official list of named dictionaries.

The purpose of including the dictionary in the seed is so that if you use
the last word as a checksum, you also can verify that the dictionary
selection is correct as well as the word sequence.

This allows substitution of words to other languages by manually specifying
a different input dictionary, but you would then have to remember both the
seed language and the translated language so you can specify both
correctly.

The user experience here matches your option 1, while the implementation
matches option 2.

If you remove specification of the seed's original language, you would need
auto detection during entry when the raw seed is just the index. I do not
recommend trying that, especially if any language would end up with
multiple competing dictionaries. Even more so if there's many related
languages which might collide (like all the Latin languages, or even US vs
UK English...).

>

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