Remember -- if you experiment with adding these "trivial" keys to your wallet, some software may generate transactions that return change to those exact keys (and it will be stolen in an instant). It's happened before.
How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#32I'm really don't know much about the technical details of bitcoin, but why is a bitcoin address tied to a specific key pair?
Why isn't the address+balance just signed with a key pair?
That way me knowing a key pair wouldn't get me an address with a balance in it...
is there something i'm missing?
EDIT: I guess it doesn't matter, since the address space is so large. Either way, if i were targeting an account, i would know what key pair to attack..
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you analyse it as probability it makes a lot more sense than intuitively thinking about it. A login & a password combination can also be seen as a unique string combination and so is 2FA i.e. a 3 string combination. Not really multiple levels of security mathematically.
With 2FA, the string changes each time you log in.
There's a finite probability of landing on the combination of login+password+2FA-string at any given instance.
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#34So... hunter2 is not ok?
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#35I have spent quite a lot of time (~250h) on this problem as part of my dissertation and found ~18k brainwallets. Most of the 10k brainwallets found by the author have probably been made by another 'researcher' who is actively probing the network to look for thieves. There are many other similar analyses online which have better and more interesting results than this. Edit: I can upload some rather large and confusing…
I am interested :D
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#36Slightly different Q : Say I have a private key with some money. All I have to do is type 'importprivkey ' in a new client and the money shows up (am I missing something)? If everyone randomly starts entering a couple of completely random combinations, is there a finite possibility that someone might simply steal a wallet? Is it like spinning a wheel of fortune? Found a very interesting analogy here : http://www.redd…
The chance of that happening is so small it's not worth worrying about, ever.
Your brain is not equipped to handle numbers on the scale of 2^-160.
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#37Deterministically generating wallets is just dumb. It's the exact opposite of randomly generating wallets. We spend all this time on making things cryptographically secure and then mess it up by using a tiny subset of the keyspace.
Why would anyone find this to be a good idea?
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#38Deterministically generating wallets is just dumb. It's the exact opposite of randomly generating wallets. We spend all this time on making things cryptographically secure and then mess it up by using a tiny subset of the keyspace. Why would anyone find this to be a good idea?
For some,
P(losing key) > P(key theft)
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#39Slightly different Q : Say I have a private key with some money. All I have to do is type 'importprivkey ' in a new client and the money shows up (am I missing something)? If everyone randomly starts entering a couple of completely random combinations, is there a finite possibility that someone might simply steal a wallet? Is it like spinning a wheel of fortune? Found a very interesting analogy here : http://www.redd…
The chance of that happening is so small it's not worth worrying about, ever. Your brain is not equipped to handle numbers on the scale of 2^-160.
I guess I've a better chance at lottery
Re: How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
#40Slightly different Q : Say I have a private key with some money. All I have to do is type 'importprivkey ' in a new client and the money shows up (am I missing something)? If everyone randomly starts entering a couple of completely random combinations, is there a finite possibility that someone might simply steal a wallet? Is it like spinning a wheel of fortune? Found a very interesting analogy here : http://www.redd…
The chance of that happening is so small it's not worth worrying about, ever. Your brain is not equipped to handle numbers on the scale of 2^-160.
Indeed, that is way smaller than planks length: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+2^-160+smaller+than...