3 ms·

> All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? No, they're s

by ronsor 3y ago

> All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? No, they're still mining Bitcoin. There's absolutely no way to crack secp256k1 keys with even a datacenter GPU. We're firmly in the realm of quantum computers if you expect to crack anything before the heat death of the universe.

px43 3y ago
First off, GPUs haven't been used for mining Bitcoin for about a decade. There has been a lot of work being done to crack brainwallets, also there are a number of leaked/hacked/shared wallets that people are working on cracking. There have also been a number of wallets generated with weak RNGs which get cracked, vulgarity wallets etc, and of course, the LastPass vaults as described in the article.
bastawhiz 3y ago
> There's absolutely no way to crack secp256k1 keys with even a datacenter GPU That's not what the article is implying is happening. > “An Nvidia 3090 can do roughly 4 million [password guesses] per second with 1000 iterations, but that would go down to 8 thousand per second with 500,000 iterations, which is why iteration count matters so much,” Weaver said. “So a combination of ‘not THAT strong of a password’ and ‘old vault’ and ‘low iteration count’ would make it theoretically crackable but real work, but the work is worth it given the targets.”
- Grimburger 3y ago
  I think the signals got crossed here, they aren't cracking public key cryptography as noted by GP, they are cracking password hashes. You can find a lot of Hashcat benchmarks online giving you are rough idea of what current consumer hardware can do against argon2 or brcypt: https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb422222fd https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb4...

3 ms·

> All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? No, they're s

by ronsor 3y ago

px43 3y ago
First off, GPUs haven't been used for mining Bitcoin for about a decade. There has been a lot of work being done to crack brainwallets, also there are a number of leaked/hacked/shared wallets that people are working on cracking. There have also been a number of wallets generated with weak RNGs which get cracked, vulgarity wallets etc, and of course, the LastPass vaults as described in the article.
bastawhiz 3y ago
> There's absolutely no way to crack secp256k1 keys with even a datacenter GPU That's not what the article is implying is happening. > “An Nvidia 3090 can do roughly 4 million [password guesses] per second with 1000 iterations, but that would go down to 8 thousand per second with 500,000 iterations, which is why iteration count matters so much,” Weaver said. “So a combination of ‘not THAT strong of a password’ and ‘old vault’ and ‘low iteration count’ would make it theoretically crackable but real work, but the work is worth it given the targets.”
- Grimburger 3y ago
  I think the signals got crossed here, they aren't cracking public key cryptography as noted by GP, they are cracking password hashes. You can find a lot of Hashcat benchmarks online giving you are rough idea of what current consumer hardware can do against argon2 or brcypt: https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb422222fd https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb4...