Monero: the secure, private, untraceable currency

^{Note: More complete work was done by u\ph4r05 here}

Ran across an XMR Trezor user that was frustrated at the lack of account verification utilities for that environment. Across the entire CryptoCurrency spectrum, the lion's share of marketcap is using the secp256k1 elliptic curve, but Monero is using the ed25519 curve. This is fine, but it creates some challenges when using some of the broader BIPs (aka Bitcoin Standards).

In this vein, many multi-coin wallets will use something called BIP39 which is similar, but different, from the 25 word Monero mnemonics. Often this BIP39 mnemonic is used to derive many different coins using BIP44. This is where things derail since BIP44 relies on BIP32 and cannot be computed on the ed25519 curve.

Well every wallet chose to solve this problem independently. Trezor proposed a new standard called SLIP10 to do BIP44 type operations for coins that did not use secp256k1. Problem is, there are very few utilities I've found that will do SLIP10 derivations.

This makes losing a Trezor with Monero rather maddening since the only way to recover the derivation is to buy another Trezor. With other coins there are a host of recovery tools that will break your seed for you such as Ian's BIP39 tool, but which doesn't support SLIP10

To help elevate this problem, I ported some of the old Python2 code in the SLIP10 spec to work with Python3 as well as incorporating the monero python library. As always you should assume that I'm a thief working for a state agency intent on stealing your coins. This code would break your seed and should not be used, but rather referenced. But for those wanting a modern reference here's the code:

• SLIP10 XMR Recovery Script

For the curious, the way Trezor does the derivations is as follows.

1. BIP39 Mnemonic and passphrase is used to generate a BIP39 Seed

2. SLIP10 Derivation is used over ed25519 to generate a child key

3. SLIP10 child-key is your "standard" Monero key and produces a Monero mnemonic