One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: A New Wallet Recovery Process

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel wallet recovery method combining visual passwords, image classifiers, and fuzzy matching to replace traditional seed phrases with photographs, enhancing security and usability.

Contribution

It introduces a new wallet recovery process that integrates visual passwords, image classification, and fuzzy matching, which was not previously combined in this way.

Findings

Photographs can effectively replace long seed phrases for wallet recovery.

The proposed method successfully retrieves wallet seeds using visual passwords.

Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

Abstract

We introduce a new wallet recovery process. Our solution associates 1) visual passwords: a photograph of a secretly picked object (Chabanne et al., 2013) with 2) ImageNet classifiers transforming images into binary vectors and, 3) obfuscated fuzzy matching (Galbraith and Zobernig, 2019) for the storage of visual passwords/retrieval of wallet seeds. Our experiments show that the replacement of long seed phrases by a photograph is possible.