Story time, a boring one anyway. So I accidentally exposed my active key yesterday, resulting in me having to attempt to generate a whole set of new keys. And before I continue let me thank @bradleyarrow for the quick heads up allowing me to act fast. You can support him as a witness here. This was a first for me but fixing it still seemed like a pretty simple task. Normally this would be an easier process but guess what? When I created my account I didnt write down my seed phrase accurately and I didnt save my keys properly. How??
HOW Sway?
Long story short, my internet was acting up so I had to refresh and repeat some steps and that ended up starting the account creation process over, hence creating new keys, and I copied the wrong set. So even though I've been able to log in to InLEO and create content via keystore, I haven't had access to my HIVE keys to perform specific HIVE functions.
Here lies the problem:
Generating new keys is one of those HIVE specific functions. Its a pretty straightforward process but without your master password or owner key you're screwed and all I had was my keystore file and keystore password.
Now, I know you can recover a keystore with a seed-phrase, now the question becomes is it possible to reverse engineer to recover a seed-phrase with a keystore file?
If the answer is yes I may be in luck. Fortunately for me, I remember @ahmadmanga mentioning that you can import your HIVE keys to HIVE keychain by using your seed phrase. Great.
Now back to reverse engineering my problem. I know a keystore is an encrypted file that grants access to your private keys/seed phrase so it seems I would need to find a way to decrypt the file. I don't know shit about developing but I'm confident Chat GPT o1 could walk me through it.
My first input was: I need to decrypt a keystore file to access my private keys. Can you walk me through these steps?
AI is amazing. Not only did it provide the steps, it gave multiple options, some troubleshooting tips, and a summary. Here's some of the reply:
Good to go right? Not quite. After walking through some of the steps and getting some errors I came to a realization. This version of keystore wallets are not created using an Ethereum address! You can tell because the end of the keystore file says "xchain-keystore" instead of displaying an eth address.
This led me to asking Chat about xchain keystores. This is the part that mattered
Since Maya is a fork of Rune this looks like the way to go.
It provided 3 options, 2 using wallets and 1 using node.js. I'm a little familiar with node.js and I know I can run it locally so I decided to go that route.
After going back-and-forth with GPT and sharing a few screenshots, we finally got it done. Now with my seed phrase, I was able to import my account to HIVE keychain, retrieve the master & owner keys, then finally generate a new set of keys to secure my account.
Takeaways
- Don't Crypto When You're Sleepy! I had just finished working an 11-hour overnight shift and had no business doing anything other than going straight to sleep. If I wasn't dog-tired it definitely wouldn't have happened.
- A reminder that artificial intelligence is extremely useful. Its the best at solving these type of issues because it will always be specifically catered towards your problem. If I couldn't ask AI to walk me through this I would've been aimlessly searching online for a matching instance of my specific problem.
- If you experience any security or privacy risks like exposed keys, passwords, etc., act fast! I don't have much liquid assets in my account but someone didn't waste any time and claimed a few bucks worth of my rewards, swapped them for about 10 HIVE and made a withdrawal lol. Can't be mad about it...this is the game we play. Exposing your keys in any scenario is screaming "take my money".
Peace & Prosperity