An efficient method to enhance Bitcoin wallet security

Abstract

With widely adoption of Bitcoin, Many malicious software trying to steal bitcoins through network has emerged in a large scale. Bitcoin makes heavy use of elliptic curve digital signature algorithm to guarantee transactions security. Each user can have lots of addresses hashed from his public keys to receive coins, and need private keys associated with these addresses to authorize spending those coins. A Bitcoin wallet give a good assistance to manage and preserve all private keys belong to its owner. However, saving complete private keys on local storage meets a big challenge in case of theft. For the purpose of securing user's private keys, we propose an efficient method to enhance Bitcoin wallet security. We combine random seeds and a passphrase for user easy to keep in mind to generate private keys whenever needed. It is only need to reserve a list of random seeds on local storage instead of complete private keys. Nobody could generate the whole private keys just relying on random seeds without the passphrase. Therefore, our method increases the difficulty for attackers to steal bitcoins. We also introduce a key recovery approach in case of the passphrase being forgotten. Our method does not incur any additional operations and is convenient to use by a common customer without professional knowledge.