21–30 of 133 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it a mistake?
As the article explains, 32 bits of entropy isn't enough for any cryptographic secret because it can be easily brute-forced.
Seems a bit overkill with a brand + domain name for every new vulnerability. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice find and all, but I'm really distracted by all the fluff.
Reminds me of attacks people were running on 'brainwallets' a while back - i.e. wallets whose initial key material was just a passphrase you'd remember. The idea was that you could keep the passphrase stored nowhere and not have to worry about it being stolen by... well, any of the 10,000 things out there looking for cryptocurrency keys. Of course, there is no way in hell you can actually make the human brain store e…
And English is a lot more than 2048 words - so you could probably use a shorter phrase and still be fine.
Reminds me of attacks people were running on 'brainwallets' a while back - i.e. wallets whose initial key material was just a passphrase you'd remember. The idea was that you could keep the passphrase stored nowhere and not have to worry about it being stolen by... well, any of the 10,000 things out there looking for cryptocurrency keys. Of course, there is no way in hell you can actually make the human brain store e…
You only need a phrase of twelve words from a 2048 word dictionary to have 128 bits of entropy. Twelve words is up to "Thy kingdom" in the Lord's Prayer, so certainly people are able to memorize twelve word phrases or even 24 word phrases without too much trouble. And English is a lot more than 2048 words - so you could probably use a shorter phrase and still be fine.
To get 128 bits of entropy with words, you need to pick about thirteen out of a million words--which is on the order of all the words in the English language--and give all of them equal probability. The sequence needs to be fully random as well. What you end up with will surely be easier to memorize than a UUID, but substantially more difficult than the start of the Lord's Prayer.
EDIT: Math is wrong, I was thinking 10 bits per million instead of 20. So 6-7 words out of a million (whole language) or 13 words out of a thousand (very limited subset of the language). Point about random selection still stands, but it's certainly easier than 13 very uncommon words. Still much harder than a realistic sentence of that length, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article explains, 32 bits of entropy isn't enough for any cryptographic secret because it can be easily brute-forced.
Also if it's really the date it's nowhere near 32 bits of entropy. I'm guessing you can pretty easily guess to the day when a Bitcoin wallet was created, so that's about 16 bits of entropy. Less if you know the time, possibly 0.
EDIT: It loops around to 0 every 4.something seconds, so it's not like everything after 4 is the same key. It's just a more random distribution than what you may be thinking.
Seems a bit overkill with a brand + domain name for every new vulnerability. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice find and all, but I'm really distracted by all the fluff.
Eh, let the security consultants have their moment. Also it's a great name. "Running bx seed on 3.x versions with a system time of 0.0 always generates the following secret: milk sad wage cup reward..."
Reminds me of attacks people were running on 'brainwallets' a while back - i.e. wallets whose initial key material was just a passphrase you'd remember. The idea was that you could keep the passphrase stored nowhere and not have to worry about it being stolen by... well, any of the 10,000 things out there looking for cryptocurrency keys. Of course, there is no way in hell you can actually make the human brain store e…
Do you have a reference for large numbers of brain wallets being drained? I believe you are repeating a myth/FUD, but I might be wrong.
Also, there was an ethereum wallet with over 40,000 ETH that got drained.
Reminds me of attacks people were running on 'brainwallets' a while back - i.e. wallets whose initial key material was just a passphrase you'd remember. The idea was that you could keep the passphrase stored nowhere and not have to worry about it being stolen by... well, any of the 10,000 things out there looking for cryptocurrency keys. Of course, there is no way in hell you can actually make the human brain store e…
You only need a phrase of twelve words from a 2048 word dictionary to have 128 bits of entropy. Twelve words is up to "Thy kingdom" in the Lord's Prayer, so certainly people are able to memorize twelve word phrases or even 24 word phrases without too much trouble. And English is a lot more than 2048 words - so you could probably use a shorter phrase and still be fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also if it's really the date it's nowhere near 32 bits of entropy. I'm guessing you can pretty easily guess to the day when a Bitcoin wallet was created, so that's about 16 bits of entropy. Less if you know the time, possibly 0.
It actually uses the most precise 32 bits of the date, so it's any, like, nanosecond between 0 and some other small amount of seconds. You can't brute force a wallet by knowing approximately when it was made, but you can brute force every mnemonic if you have the time or a bit of cash to throw at a server. EDIT: It loops around to 0 every 4.something seconds, so it's not like everything after 4 is the same key. It's…