BIP39 PBKDF2 weakness explainer
heavilyarmedc-pbkdf2-weakness
- Author
- @heavilyarmedc
- Organisation
- independent
- Evidence role
- independent-technical-analysis
- Posted
- 3 Aug 2026, 02:20 UTC
- Capture status
- capture held
Explains, citing Greg Maxwell, why BIP 39 seed derivation via PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 with 2048 iterations gives little protection when input entropy is poor: the KDF is compute-bound rather than memory-hard and highly parallelizable on GPUs, ASICs or FPGAs, so weak-entropy seeds are cheap to grind.
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