So I traded in my phone thinking I had the entirety of my passphrase emailed to myself and then come to find I only had the first 13 words. Is there any possible way for me to recover the remaining 12? I saw someone using Python to recover their 25th word when they had the first 24. Can the same type of thing be used to recover my remaining words?
Hi, @Rayray , welcome to Algorand Forum!
Short answer: There is no way to recover the last 12 words with the present computer technique.
Long answer, i.e. the boring details: every word of the passphrase codes 12 bits of the private key. The lat word is a “checksum”, so we can ignore it. So, there are 11*12 bits = 132 bits missing, and to try it with brute force, there are 2^132 possibilities to try, that is roughly (2^10)^13 = (10^3)^13 = 10^39 possibility. Just to remind you, that is one hundred trillion * trillion, where trillion is taken in the EU sense, i.e. 10^18. For American readers, that is one hundred trillion_US * trillion_US * trillion_US, where trillion_US is 10^12.
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