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Paper Password Splitting

Below you'll find resources for splitting passwords on paper, and for recovering split passwords.

For background information, see this blog article.

Please perform password recovery with pen and paper, using a battery-powered calculator if needed.

Recovery

1. Find a pair of recovery phrases

   To recover a split password, you'll need a matching pair of recovery phrases. If they're labeled according to the above article, a matching pair of recovery phrases will be labeled like "A1" and "A2", or "B1" and "B2", or similar.

2. Find the wordlist

   Once you've obtained a matching pair of recovery phrases, you'll need the "wordlist" originally used to create the recovery phrases. If the recovery phrases are written on a recovery sheet the location of the wordlist should be listed.

   Commonly-used wordlists are linked below.

   If the recovery phrases are regular passwords, not multiple-word phrases, you'll be using a list of ASCII characters (letters/numbers/symbols) instead of a wordlist, but it recovery works the same way.

3. Perform recovery

   Grab a piece of paper, a pen, and perhaps a battery-powered calculator.

   The recovery itself is done with "modular addition" of each Nth word in both recovery phrases.

   1. ADD the numeric values of the 1st word of both recovery phrases (numeric values found in the wordlist). If the sum is larger than the number of words in the wordlist, SUBTRACT the number of words in the wordlist. Write down the final numeric value for the 1st word, then find the word in the wordlist with that numeric value. That's the 1st word of the secret password.

   2. ADD the numeric values of the 2nd word of both recovery phrases (numeric values found in the wordlist). If the sum is larger than the number of words in the wordlist, SUBTRACT the number of words in the wordlist. Write down the final numeric value for the 2nd word, then find the word in the wordlist with that numeric value. That's the 2nd word of the secret password.

   3. And so on with the 3rd, 4th, etc., words in the recovery phrases.

   4. You now have recovered all the words of the original secret password.

Example recovery using 7,776-word wordlist:

recovery phrase	justify 3540	routine 5557	banana 485	suffix 6573	monotype 3983	exfoliate 2419
recovery phrase	boss 647	hamburger 3086	bronchial 709	reset 5382	virtuous 7554	cut 1525
	+
mod 7776	4187	8643 - 7776	1194	11955 - 7776	11537 - 7776	3944
secret phrase	4187 nurture	867 cardiac	1194 commence	4179 numeral	3761 luckless	3944 mobilize

For another example, the "2-of-2 splitting section in the blog article shows how a passphrase can be split into two recovery phrases and then recovered.

Wordlists

The wordlists below all have number columns for use with paper password splitting.

For password recovery, you can ignore the columns with dice values.

Diceware

philthompson.me Customized EFF Wordlist 2019 — 2019 version of a 5-die 7,776-word English wordlist, based on the EFF's long wordlist

BIP39

BIP39 English — 2,048 English words standardized for BIP39 crypto currency mnemonic wallet seeds

ASCII

philthompson.me ASCII — Custom ordering of the ASCII character set to easily find character values from 1-94

ASCII Decimal Values Minus 32 — Standard ASCII character set, where we subtract 32 from each ASCII decimal value to create numbered characters from 1-94

Lowercase Alpha-Numeric — ASCII characters, lowercase only, plus the digits 0-9

Uppercase Alpha-Numeric — ASCII characters, uppercase only, plus the digits 0-9

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Diceware™ is a trademark of Arnold G. Reinhold, and for more information you can visit his Diceware page.