Securely Generating a Seed

Securely Generating a Seed

Seeds are the main thing that needs to be securely stored, as the seed is being used to derive private keys from, and thus for generating addresses and signing transactions. Seeds in IOTA consist of 81 Trytes ('9,A-Z'), which is equivalent to 384 bits security.

We leave it up to exchanges to securely generate their seeds. Most programming languages have a cryptographically secure enough PRNG (mostly based on /dev/urandom) that can be used for generating seeds automatically. Exchanges can also use their own implementations to take additional entropy (Example Seed Generator).

Examples

Linux

cat /dev/urandom |tr -dc A-Z9|head -c${1:-81}

Mac

cat /dev/urandom |LC_ALL=C tr -dc 'A-Z9' | fold -w 81 | head -n 1