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Created August 11, 2023 15:55
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Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets - Hardened versus Non-hardened Keys
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hd-wallet.md

Hardened vs Non-hardened

With non-hardened keys, one can derive child public keys of a given non-hardened parent key without knowing any private key.

You cannot do this with hardened keys.

Non-Hardened Security Risks

Knowledge of a parent extended public key plus any non-hardened private key descending from it is equivalent to knowing the parent extended private key (and thus every private and public key descending from it).

This means that extended public keys must be treated more carefully than regular public keys. It is also the reason for the existence of hardened keys, and why they are used for the account level in the tree. This way, a leak of account-specific (or below) private key never risks compromising the master or other accounts.

Source: BIP32

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