Scrambled Recovery Entry

“When recovering, KeepKey scrambles the alphabet on the device screen. You enter words by position — never by typing actual letters. Keyloggers see nothing useful.”

— card 3 of 3, shown before setup

What this screen is telling you

Recovery is the one moment your entire seed passes through a user interface. Every other wallet does this with a text box — which means, for those few minutes, your recovery phrase exists in plaintext on a general-purpose computer. That is where seeds get stolen.

KeepKey never puts the letters on your computer. It puts a shuffled alphabet on the device screen, and your computer only ever sees which square you clicked.

How the cipher input works

The device shows the alphabet in a random layout — for example:
```
Q W F P G J
L U Y A R S
T D H N E I
O Z X C V B K M
```
The desktop application shows a blank grid in the same arrangement. No letters.
For each letter of the current word, look at the device, find the letter, and click that position on the computer. To enter F, find F on the device and click wherever it sits.
The device autocompletes each word from the BIP39 list once enough letters are in — you’ll see the word resolve on the device screen.
The alphabet reshuffles for the next word. The same position never means the same letter twice.

What attack this defeats

Attack	What the attacker gets
Keylogger	Mouse clicks on a blank grid
Screen recorder	A video of blank squares being clicked
Clipboard sniffing	Nothing — you never copy or paste
Compromised desktop app	Positions, with a mapping it never receives
Shoulder surfing your monitor	Nothing — the letters are on the device, facing you

The only way to read the phrase during recovery is to see the device screen at the same time. So: shield the device, not the monitor.

Rules while recovering

Look at the device, not the computer. The device is the source of truth; the desktop grid is just a click surface.
Be alone, and out of camera view. Webcams, security cameras, and windows all see the device screen.
Enter words in order, exactly as written down.
Pick the right word count first. A 12-word phrase entered as a 24-word recovery will not work — see Set Up Your Wallet.

If a word won’t take

The device only accepts words from the BIP39 English wordlist. If a word is rejected, check your backup for a transcription error — recieve/receive, flat/float, an ambiguous handwritten letter. Every BIP39 word is uniquely identified by its first four letters, which is often enough to disambiguate bad handwriting.