Enter passphrase, then Bitcoin Wallet Crashes. #955

I encrypted my wallet a little while ago, but I forgot what password I used.

I went through the list of my usual passwords, and was getting: "The password entered for the wallet decryption was incorrect. "

When I enter a certain password that I use sometimes, Bitcoin Wallet will crash

Screen Shot: http://imgur.com/Nz2SI

I tried using that password to change passphrase and send bitcoins and it will cause Bitcoin Wallet to crash.

I can try any other password I can think of and I get "passphrase entered for the wallet decryption was incorrect."

debug.log is showing

EXCEPTION: 9key_error
CKey::SetSecret() : secret must be 32 bytes
C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe in Runaway exception

I should also note that I tried moving this wallet to 2 other Windows computers and still the same thing.

You guys have seen this issue before

#711

Also I tried Pywallet.py to dump the keys, but I'm getting "wrong password" on all the passwords tried

Which bitcoin version?

was using 0.4.0, I updated to 0.5.3.1-beta and I'm still getting the crash.

What about 0.6 RC4, does this work? Are there any special characters in the password?

Thanks for the quick replies everyone.

I'll give 0.6 RC4 a go. There are no special characters in the password. The password is 7 alpha numeric characters, the first 5 characters are letters with the first letter being uppercase and the last two characters are just numbers.

Same problem with 0.6 RC4

Too bad, is it the same error in the debug.log as before?

Yes same error in debug.log,

Can someone explain to me what's happening here?

bool SetSecret(const CSecret& vchSecret, bool fCompressed = false) { EC_KEY_free(pkey); pkey = EC_KEY_new_by_curve_name(NID_secp256k1); if (pkey == NULL) throw key_error("CKey::SetSecret() : EC_KEY_new_by_curve_name failed"); if (vchSecret.size() != 32) throw key_error("CKey::SetSecret() : secret must be 32 bytes"); BIGNUM *bn = BN_bin2bn(&vchSecret[0],32,BN_new()); if (bn == NULL) throw key_error("CKey::SetSecret() : BN_bin2bn failed"); if (!EC_KEY_regenerate_key(pkey,bn)) { BN_clear_free(bn); throw key_error("CKey::SetSecret() : EC_KEY_regenerate_key failed"); } BN_clear_free(bn); fSet = true; if (fCompressed || fCompressedPubKey) SetCompressedPubKey(); return true; }

That function initializes the EC_KEY object embedded in a CKey to have a given (32-byte) secret (CSecret). In your case that function is called with an empty CSecret, which shouldn't happen.

Is secret based on my password or a public key?

I wish I understood this a bit more. Sorry for all the simple questions, but I'm really curious about how this class works and where the corruption happened.

I used Fairdell HxCmp to do a byte comparison of 2 known good encrypted wallets and then I compared a good encrypted wallet to my bad encrypted wallet.

Start at offset 4200, the bad wallet is all 00 00 00 the good wallet has data at this location. The 2 good wallets have data at this location as can be seen in Image #1 of the photo Album located below.

Data starts to re-appear again at offset 6000. I'm not sure if any of this helps to make sense of this.

The Photo Album can be found here. http://imgur.com/a/DhC8Z#0

Consensus is this is a "we don't know how it happened but somehow the bits on your disk are not what they should be" problem that we can't reproduce.

I moved the priority from high to medium, and removed the 0.6.0 milestone from this issue, but I think the only fix for problems like these will be a much better scheme for backing up and restoring wallets.