7 ms·

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.

ryan-c 3y ago
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~vasek/papers/vasekfc16.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~vasek/papers/vasekfc16.pdf Also, there was an ethereum wallet with over 40,000 ETH that got drained.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  From their conclusion: > By examining 300 billion candidate passwords, we found 884 brain wallets that were active at some point in time. Unfortunately, we also found that nearly all were drained – usually quickly. While our findings are necessarily incomplete, they certainly suggest that brain wallets are not a secure method for using bitcoin. Perhaps the most surprising result of our analysis is the relative scarcity of brain wallets in use today. This is actually quite encouraging, because it means that fewer users are at risk to these attacks than has previously been supposed. I don’t think that logic holds up. It’s pretty much an entire paper of FUD. And no, anyone with 400,000 ETH who claims they used a brain wallet, and oppsie .. someone stole it. Is having a boating accident, if you know what I mean.
  - ryan-c 3y ago
    Someone used the passphrase "how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood" to store 250 BTC. I personally drained it by mistake, then tracked down the owner, via the pool he'd mined it from. I'm a co-author of that paper, we later got funding to do a larger cracking run and found more wallets, and even some that still had balances. See slide 18: https://rya.nc/files/measuring_the_use_and_abuse_of_brain_wallets.pdf https://rya.nc/files/measuring_the_use_and_abuse_of_brain_wa... Feeding a massive corpus reddit comments and six years of IRC logs into the cracking tool was particularly interesting. > And no, anyone with 400,000 ETH who claims they used a brain wallet, and oppsie .. someone stole it. Is having a boating accident, if you know what I mean. It was about 40,000. The password was "guybrush", and I spoke to the guy who made it. He didn't understand how the tool worked when he made an address. Much later, the Ethereum foundation sent him the ETH. It was gone by the time he went to spend it. Dude put out a press release offering to let whoever did it keep half if they gave back the other half. The ETH hasn't moved since the day it was stolen, almost eight years ago. I assure you, the guy made a genuine fucky wucky. If I'd gone blackhat with this research, I could be retired to a volcano lair on a private island by now. WTF is your angle here?
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      That sounds exactly like a well acted boating accident. My angle is that simple brain wallets that use a combination of a memorable phrase with some individual information, like the user’s name, birthdate, address and a 4 digit PIN, used as salt, are then extremely secure. And your paper and the original comment I responded to don’t emphasize that it’s the user’s use of such an systen that makes them vulnerable not the foundation of the technique of brainwallets. Basically you’re blaming the car for the drivers not understanding how to drive and immediately crashing.
      - ryan-c 3y ago
        > don’t emphasize that it’s the user’s use of such an systen that makes them vulnerable not the foundation of the technique of brainwallets. That's because it is the foundation of the technique that makes them vulnerable. They are an "attractive nuisance". A system must be evaluated based on "typical use", not "perfect use". You come across as a social Darwinist who would be happy for all the warning labels to be removed from everything and all safety regulations repealed. The world you advocate for would be an awful dystopia. You have nothing to say I haven't heard before.
        alchemist1e9 3y ago
        > WTF is your angle here? I think this more applied to you. You actually invested time to write a paper about brainwallets because some people don’t understand or know how to use them properly. The paper is not logical, if it was then a small POC I know about is all of them, which obviously it isn’t, you can’t find serious people’s brainwallets, they would be salted in a way that it’s hopeless to crack. You claim brainwallets are fundamentally unsafe, which honestly is total nonsense if you understand them and how they work. I’m gonna guess you’re a ban Bitcoin type because it’s… wrong or whatever.
        ryan-c 3y ago
        I'm going to go play chess with a pigeon, it seems like a better use of my time.
yieldcrv 3y ago
What would change your view about that? This was one of the best uses of GPUs 10 years ago, people still have those instances running just in case people use “obscure” common phrases from books again instead of mnemonics Its more like anyone that thought they were clever got swept. There arent statistics, just threads on bitcointalk and reddit
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  If you used common phrases from books you definitely aren’t clever and deserve to have your funds swept.
  - nullc 3y ago
    The person who originated the practice and created the first "brainwallet" site did exactly what you're doing: insisted that it was secure, and insisted that people who lost their funds deserved it. Are you also doing what he did? stealing the funds of the deserving victims yourself? Eventually taking the weak brainwallets he talked people into creating wasn't enough: He lost his bitcoin (I think via gambling but maybe an exchange hack), whined he was broke for a while, and whined that not many people were making hackable brainwallets, then added a more explicit vulnerability to the site. He vanished after it was caught.
werrett 3y ago
It’s not not a myth. Not even really lost to time (or a simple Google search). E.g https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zti1p/17956_hacked_brainwallet_passwords/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zti1p/17956_hacke... https://www.wired.com/2015/07/brainflayer-password-cracker-steals-bitcoins-brain/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/brainflayer-password-cracker-s...
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  FUD!! and you know it if you actually took time to read the post. > I could find the passwords for 17.956 of the addresses. * Only 2 addresses of the hacked brainwallets are currently not empty, and the total money that I could actually steal is 0.00115215 BTC. > Somebody seems to have systematically flooded the blockchain with transaction to brainwallets. E.g. this transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/ba421da33e5f85669d9312b804e22fa4cfd1392bb7bb51c7390c91d8598cd071 https://blockchain.info/tx/ba421da33e5f85669d9312b804e22fa4c... It seems that each target address is actually a brainwallet and alphabetically ordered. The passwords for the first 3 addresses are Hollister, hollowing, Nobody’s real brain wallets are being hacked! It’s just left over traces from someone running aome testing in early days of bitcoin. This one says 17K wallets … oppsie all empty and obviously programmatically generated! i.e not used for real. The other paper found 800!! supposedly… all empty. A well designed brainwallet is perfectly fine and safe, just don’t use a sequential phrase from known sources and modify the words you do. Obviously.
  - nullc 3y ago
    > Nobody’s real brain wallets are being hacked! It’s just left over traces from someone running aome testing in early days of bitcoin. I've talked to a LOT of real people who's real brainwallets were hacked. Certainly there is also some 'testing' but that doesn't change the fact that there have been real and substantial losses. Brainwallets are very dangerous. A brainwallet is the same thing as using a user provided password to secure a high value system that has an unsalted and public password hash database. This is a negligent practice. In the corporate world it wouldn't be shocking to learn that a security engineer was instantly fired for implementing such a practice. Good security advice results in practical security even if the user uses the system less than perfectly. Attacker-originated security "advice" provides security only under unrealistic perfect use. Telling people to use brainwallets is like recommending one-time-pad encryption. In practice the security will be fragile if not outright broken though in theory with it may go okay sometimes. Correct usage would require secure mechanically generated uniformly random seed phrases with a hundred plus bits of entropy. That isn't generally what people do in practice and the few who have often have issues with retention of the string being inevitably very poor, causing them to lose the funds by forgetting (esp after getting a fever). (Of course, if they're going to write it down and they didn't generate it themselves then it's not something anyone should be calling a brainwallet anymore.)

ryan-c 3y ago

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~vasek/papers/vasekfc16.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~vasek/papers/vasekfc16.pdf Also, there was an ethereum wallet with over 40,000 ETH that got drained.

alchemist1e9 3y ago
From their conclusion: > By examining 300 billion candidate passwords, we found 884 brain wallets that were active at some point in time. Unfortunately, we also found that nearly all were drained – usually quickly. While our findings are necessarily incomplete, they certainly suggest that brain wallets are not a secure method for using bitcoin. Perhaps the most surprising result of our analysis is the relative scarcity of brain wallets in use today. This is actually quite encouraging, because it means that fewer users are at risk to these attacks than has previously been supposed. I don’t think that logic holds up. It’s pretty much an entire paper of FUD. And no, anyone with 400,000 ETH who claims they used a brain wallet, and oppsie .. someone stole it. Is having a boating accident, if you know what I mean.
- ryan-c 3y ago
  Someone used the passphrase "how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood" to store 250 BTC. I personally drained it by mistake, then tracked down the owner, via the pool he'd mined it from. I'm a co-author of that paper, we later got funding to do a larger cracking run and found more wallets, and even some that still had balances. See slide 18: https://rya.nc/files/measuring_the_use_and_abuse_of_brain_wallets.pdf https://rya.nc/files/measuring_the_use_and_abuse_of_brain_wa... Feeding a massive corpus reddit comments and six years of IRC logs into the cracking tool was particularly interesting. > And no, anyone with 400,000 ETH who claims they used a brain wallet, and oppsie .. someone stole it. Is having a boating accident, if you know what I mean. It was about 40,000. The password was "guybrush", and I spoke to the guy who made it. He didn't understand how the tool worked when he made an address. Much later, the Ethereum foundation sent him the ETH. It was gone by the time he went to spend it. Dude put out a press release offering to let whoever did it keep half if they gave back the other half. The ETH hasn't moved since the day it was stolen, almost eight years ago. I assure you, the guy made a genuine fucky wucky. If I'd gone blackhat with this research, I could be retired to a volcano lair on a private island by now. WTF is your angle here?
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    That sounds exactly like a well acted boating accident. My angle is that simple brain wallets that use a combination of a memorable phrase with some individual information, like the user’s name, birthdate, address and a 4 digit PIN, used as salt, are then extremely secure. And your paper and the original comment I responded to don’t emphasize that it’s the user’s use of such an systen that makes them vulnerable not the foundation of the technique of brainwallets. Basically you’re blaming the car for the drivers not understanding how to drive and immediately crashing.
    - ryan-c 3y ago
      > don’t emphasize that it’s the user’s use of such an systen that makes them vulnerable not the foundation of the technique of brainwallets. That's because it is the foundation of the technique that makes them vulnerable. They are an "attractive nuisance". A system must be evaluated based on "typical use", not "perfect use". You come across as a social Darwinist who would be happy for all the warning labels to be removed from everything and all safety regulations repealed. The world you advocate for would be an awful dystopia. You have nothing to say I haven't heard before.
      - alchemist1e9 3y ago
        > WTF is your angle here? I think this more applied to you. You actually invested time to write a paper about brainwallets because some people don’t understand or know how to use them properly. The paper is not logical, if it was then a small POC I know about is all of them, which obviously it isn’t, you can’t find serious people’s brainwallets, they would be salted in a way that it’s hopeless to crack. You claim brainwallets are fundamentally unsafe, which honestly is total nonsense if you understand them and how they work. I’m gonna guess you’re a ban Bitcoin type because it’s… wrong or whatever.
        ryan-c 3y ago
        I'm going to go play chess with a pigeon, it seems like a better use of my time.

yieldcrv 3y ago

What would change your view about that? This was one of the best uses of GPUs 10 years ago, people still have those instances running just in case people use “obscure” common phrases from books again instead of mnemonics Its more like anyone that thought they were clever got swept. There arent statistics, just threads on bitcointalk and reddit

alchemist1e9 3y ago
If you used common phrases from books you definitely aren’t clever and deserve to have your funds swept.
- nullc 3y ago
  The person who originated the practice and created the first "brainwallet" site did exactly what you're doing: insisted that it was secure, and insisted that people who lost their funds deserved it. Are you also doing what he did? stealing the funds of the deserving victims yourself? Eventually taking the weak brainwallets he talked people into creating wasn't enough: He lost his bitcoin (I think via gambling but maybe an exchange hack), whined he was broke for a while, and whined that not many people were making hackable brainwallets, then added a more explicit vulnerability to the site. He vanished after it was caught.

werrett 3y ago

It’s not not a myth. Not even really lost to time (or a simple Google search). E.g https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zti1p/17956_hacked_brainwallet_passwords/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zti1p/17956_hacke... https://www.wired.com/2015/07/brainflayer-password-cracker-steals-bitcoins-brain/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/brainflayer-password-cracker-s...

alchemist1e9 3y ago
FUD!! and you know it if you actually took time to read the post. > I could find the passwords for 17.956 of the addresses. * Only 2 addresses of the hacked brainwallets are currently not empty, and the total money that I could actually steal is 0.00115215 BTC. > Somebody seems to have systematically flooded the blockchain with transaction to brainwallets. E.g. this transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/ba421da33e5f85669d9312b804e22fa4cfd1392bb7bb51c7390c91d8598cd071 https://blockchain.info/tx/ba421da33e5f85669d9312b804e22fa4c... It seems that each target address is actually a brainwallet and alphabetically ordered. The passwords for the first 3 addresses are Hollister, hollowing, Nobody’s real brain wallets are being hacked! It’s just left over traces from someone running aome testing in early days of bitcoin. This one says 17K wallets … oppsie all empty and obviously programmatically generated! i.e not used for real. The other paper found 800!! supposedly… all empty. A well designed brainwallet is perfectly fine and safe, just don’t use a sequential phrase from known sources and modify the words you do. Obviously.
- nullc 3y ago
  > Nobody’s real brain wallets are being hacked! It’s just left over traces from someone running aome testing in early days of bitcoin. I've talked to a LOT of real people who's real brainwallets were hacked. Certainly there is also some 'testing' but that doesn't change the fact that there have been real and substantial losses. Brainwallets are very dangerous. A brainwallet is the same thing as using a user provided password to secure a high value system that has an unsalted and public password hash database. This is a negligent practice. In the corporate world it wouldn't be shocking to learn that a security engineer was instantly fired for implementing such a practice. Good security advice results in practical security even if the user uses the system less than perfectly. Attacker-originated security "advice" provides security only under unrealistic perfect use. Telling people to use brainwallets is like recommending one-time-pad encryption. In practice the security will be fragile if not outright broken though in theory with it may go okay sometimes. Correct usage would require secure mechanically generated uniformly random seed phrases with a hundred plus bits of entropy. That isn't generally what people do in practice and the few who have often have issues with retention of the string being inevitably very poor, causing them to lose the funds by forgetting (esp after getting a fever). (Of course, if they're going to write it down and they didn't generate it themselves then it's not something anyone should be calling a brainwallet anymore.)