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Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

wired.com

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Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#71

Post by Natsu »

ColinWright wrote: post #52
brightball wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, greed. Further correction though, it actually says “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” If you really go down the rabbit hole, pride is probably the root of all evil. It’s certainly the root of greed.

> it actually says “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” That depends on the translation you're using[0] ... it might be interesting to go back to the original (as best we can). Also "all kinds of evil" can be interpreted in (at least) two ways, so it's ambiguous anyway. But as with all these things, it's perhaps best to use the text to spark a search for a truth, or at least a useful guiding principl…

Young's literal translation is pretty good for those who don't read Koine Greek or otherwise aren't eager to break out a copy of Strong's concordance. It's interesting to see the minor difference between "a root" and "the root" for example:

9 and those wishing to be rich, do fall into temptation and a snare, and many desires, foolish and hurtful, that sink men into ruin and destruction,

10 for a root of all the evils is the love of money, which certain longing for did go astray from the faith, and themselves did pierce through with many sorrows;

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#72

Post by shakow »

kube-system wrote: post #38
INTPenis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.

I hate on crypto any chance I get, but crypto has damn near a monopoly in facilitating black and/or grey market electronic transactions. It is very in demand, for instance, in helping dictators evade sanctions, or helping criminals extort or trade illegally.

> in helping dictators evade sanctions

Let's be realistic here, most of dictators evading sanctions do it (i) with good ol' bags of $/€/CHF/£, (ii) gold/platinum/diamonds/..., (iii) whatever ad-hoc currency satisfies the two parties (promises, shares, goods, ...); in short everything but traceable-in-the-open digital currencies where most of the in/egress feature mandatory KYC.

If you believe e.g. that the US/EU firms still doing business in Russia are doing it in ETH/BTC, I have a port in Serbia to sell you.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#73

Post by darkclouds »

INTPenis wrote: post #24
malshe wrote: post #3

> Michael says he was lucky that he lost the password years ago because, otherwise, he would have sold off the bitcoin when it was worth $40,000 a coin and missed out on a greater fortune. This is so true for stocks too

Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.

[dead]

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#74

Post by from-nibly »

INTPenis wrote: post #24
malshe wrote: post #3

> Michael says he was lucky that he lost the password years ago because, otherwise, he would have sold off the bitcoin when it was worth $40,000 a coin and missed out on a greater fortune. This is so true for stocks too

Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.

Stocks arent tied to company performance unless they have divendends. Which would mean most stocks are also tied to nothing. Except stocks have recognizable logos I guess.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#75

Post by currymj »

dylan604 wrote: post #27
Stagnant wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly recommended, didn't think I'd watch the whole thing but the production quality was great and it explains everything much better than the wired article.

After your reco after the GP's reco, I would have to agree. This is well done. However, coming from a coding/dev background, it was easy to follow and it all makes sense. However, it goes to show why hacking will never be made interesting in movies without a bunch of fake nonsense like hacking the Gibson's 3D virtual environment.

“Hackers” is interesting because there’s two depictions of hacking in the same movie.

One is flying through the holographic city of files.

The other depiction is quite realistic: they show the protagonist spending all night reading through many pages of assembly to reverse engineer a virus, people do social engineering, etc. “Hackers” made this seem cool too!

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#76

Post by behringer »

INTPenis wrote: post #40
jen729w wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no shill for crypto, but you can’t with a straight face claim that all non-crypto financial instruments are ‘tied to … some sort of service that people want’. There’s a whole world of shady crap going on in the ‘legitimate’ financial space.

Oh absolutely. Money is the root of all evil. But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.

One of the greatest uses of crypto is the ability to transfer any amount of money to any point on earth for next to nothing and no questions asked.

That is worth more than most any other use for crypto.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#77

Post by AlotOfReading »

demondemidi wrote: post #62

That is super lucky. They didn’t break the crypto, they broke the PRNG. Amateur wallet design. Any security programmer with a passing knowledge of NIST entropy requirements 800-90 a/b/c would have never done this.

Almost all cryptosystems are broken by implementation issues, not attacks on the algorithms themselves. This may be a particularly straightforward attack, but crypto is hard. There's a lot of details you have to get right and a single mistake can destroy all the effort, regardless of how much else you got right.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#78

Post by kube-system »

shakow wrote: post #72
kube-system wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate on crypto any chance I get, but crypto has damn near a monopoly in facilitating black and/or grey market electronic transactions. It is very in demand, for instance, in helping dictators evade sanctions, or helping criminals extort or trade illegally.

> in helping dictators evade sanctions Let's be realistic here, most of dictators evading sanctions do it (i) with good ol' bags of $/€/CHF/£, (ii) gold/platinum/diamonds/..., (iii) whatever ad-hoc currency satisfies the two parties (promises, shares, goods, ...); in short everything but traceable-in-the-open digital currencies where most of the in/egress feature mandatory KYC. If you believe e.g. that the US/EU firm…

That's why I specified 'electronic'. Moving physical items around the globe is obviously within the ability of an independent state, but it has logistical overhead. ETH/BTC is comparatively cheap to move.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#79

Post by ipython »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #30
arp242 wrote: post #13

So Roboform has almost certainly thousands (of not millions) of users with weak passwords, and not only didn't they tell anyone, all they give is a shrug when asked about it. What a bunch of bozos.

I mean how weak are they really? These guys knew the algo and still struggled and pestered the user over and over for the other parameters. They also had what I would describe as an extreme motivation to crack this.

The constraint is knowing when the password was created. If you know that within a day or so, that makes the problem much more tractable and you can instead focus on number of characters and the other parameters.

Sniffing traffic (yes even encrypted) would be enough to see if you’re going through the login or initial user establishment flow, and that would give you a precise time when the password was generated.

This is a serious flaw.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#80

Post by ipython »

demondemidi wrote: post #62

That is super lucky. They didn’t break the crypto, they broke the PRNG. Amateur wallet design. Any security programmer with a passing knowledge of NIST entropy requirements 800-90 a/b/c would have never done this.

This happens all the time. If I had a nickel for every system I broke with a time based prng, I’d have like 10 bucks by now.
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