3 ms·
>...it would take a single GPU about a year to crack a password of average complexity with 500 iterations, and about 10 years to crack the same password run thr
by mcdonje 3y ago
>...it would take a single GPU about a year to crack a password of average complexity with 500 iterations, and about 10 years to crack the same password run through 5,000 iterations.
>However, these numbers radically come down when a determined adversary also has other large-scale computational assets at their disposal, such as a bitcoin mining operation that can coordinate the password-cracking activity across multiple powerful systems simultaneously.
Wow. I'll bet Satoshi didn't consider this second order effect of the proof of work scheme. People who build energy intensive mining operations have the means and incentive to turn their mining operations on existing accounts when that becomes more lucrative than creating new blocks.
- havnagiggle 3y agoPretty sure Bitcoin mining has been ASIC dominated for ~8 years now. Maybe you could point at Eth which only just recently moved away from being GPU heavy.
- wkat4242 3y agoIf LastPass happened to use the exact same primitive as bitcoin this Asic hardware could still be used. Not sure if the case.
- everfree 3y agoBitcoin's primitive is sha256(sha256(x)). There's zero reason anyone would ever use a funky construction like that for password hashing.
- andirk 3y agoIs cracking a sha256(x) the same runtime as sha256(sha256(sha256(sha256((x)))))? I remember the first time I saw bitcoin's double use of sha256 like this, and I was confused as to whether there is a security benefit to this.
- ronsor 3y agoI can see it now: a developer copying Bitcoin code into his authentication library because "Bitcoin is secure"
- greyface- 3y agoFurthermore, mining ASICs bake in assumptions about the structure of x as an optimization. I'm not sure they can even be used to hash arbitrary values of x.