Codex32

Summary:

The Cult of the Bound Variable was a secret society that used sandstone wheels marked with glyphs to carry out cryptographic computations and protect their secrets. They employed Codex32, a secret sharing system that allowed them to carve secrets into multiple tablets and scatter them around the world. The discovery of this system may be of interest to the Bitcoin community.Dr. Leon O. Curr and Professor Pearlwort Snead from the Department of Archaeocryptography have requested a record assignment in the Bibliography of Immemorial Philosophy repository to provide a summary of the codex32 standard for backing up and restoring the master seed of a hierarchical deterministic wallet using Shamir's secret sharing. The document includes an encoding format, a BCH error-correcting checksum, and algorithms for share generation and secret recovery. Codex32 is an alternative to BIP-0039 and SLIP-0039 for generating BIP-0032 master seeds. However, the authors do not recommend interconversion. Instead, users who wish to switch to codex32 should generate a fresh seed and sweep their coins. The scheme is based on the observation that the Lagrange interpolation of valid codewords in a BCH code will always be a valid codeword.For a fresh master seed, the user chooses a threshold value and an identifier, then generates random codex32 shares. With this set of shares, new shares can be derived, thereby generating a fresh master seed. Long codex32 strings are defined to support longer seeds, with a payload between 75 and 103 Bech32 characters and a checksum consisting of 15 Bech32 characters.The document provides five test vectors for the codex32 format. These test vectors demonstrate how to use codex32 to generate a new master seed, split an existing master seed into shares, convert a secret into a codex32 secret, and append a checksum to a new master seed. The first test vector demonstrates usage without splitting the secret into shares, while the remaining vectors involve generating or splitting shares.The mathematical companion section explains the generating polynomial for the BCH code.

Updated on: 2023-05-22T23:39:13.682448+00:00