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Bitcoin Private Key Necromancy
- splitbrain 13y agoI guess this wouldn't work with an encrypted wallet.dat which was introduced later than 2011.
- 1337biz 13y agoIs there any tool to brute force/run password lists against wallet.dats? I have one around that I am adding coins to but just can't remember my own password.
- liam_ja 13y agohttps://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_encryption https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_encryption It would be pretty unfeasible to attempt a brute-force, due to the number of encryption rounds.
- 1337biz 13y agoI usually use a similar pattern for my passwords. That way I could probably generate a few hundred combinations and run the list against the wallet. Would of cause be easier if there were a tool for doing that.
- Anderkent 13y agoThere is a service! http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/ http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/
- JorgePasada 13y agoA++ Recommend Dave, good guy.
- nwh 13y ago6 attempts a second on a high end i7 is as good as it gets. If you don't remember 90% of it then the coins are lost.
- celticninja 13y agowhy thye fuck would you keep adding coins to it if you dont know the password? More likely you have obtained someone elses wallet.dat file that they have encrypted and they do not know you have a copy of this wallet.dat so they are still using it, and you do not know their key but would quite like to access their coins.
- 1337biz 13y agoNope, it is just that I still have some hope in my abilities to guess the right password. I'm quite the optimist by nature ;)
- celticninja 13y agothere is optimistic and there is stupid. send any new coins to a new address, sure you may remember the password but hedge against that possibility with another wallet, please. for my sake, for my sanity, do it for me.
- JorgePasada 13y agoYeah the wallet in this post was created around version 0.3 or 0.4 of the Bitcoin client if I remember correctly.
- ge0rg 13y agoI wonder how long it takes for admins at VPS hosting providers to start harvesting private keys from VPS instances, using this tool or, where available, direct filesystem access...
- rmc 13y agoAbout as long as it'll take them to start harvesting credit card details from the same clients.
- omh 13y agoCredit card thefts can be reversed. If they can't detect which of the admins did it then what are they going to do?
- ge0rg 13y agoAlso, credit card numbers do expire. You could just make a backup copy of somebody's private key and wait a year or two before transferring all their funds to your account, unless they move the money away to a different address themselves.
- xyzzy123 13y agoIt's an interesting point. That said, forensics on VPS's / cloud providers is already a big thing. Until now it's mostly been databases, secrets, SSH keys etc. Well-known providers zero their storage... lesser known, not so much.
- rmc 13y ago> Credit card thefts can be reversed. Yeah, that's the only reason hosting companies don't mass harvest credit card numbers from their customer's websites
- yumcoin 13y agoIf you set up your VPS with a hierarchical deterministic wallet[1] or a passphrase-protected private key[2], your hosting provider will be unable to determine your private key. [1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi... [2]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0038.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0038.mediawi...
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI saw this post when the author submitted it to /r/bitcoin several hours ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1t5fgr/i_wrote_a_tool_to_pull_private_bitcoin_keys_off/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1t5fgr/i_wrote_a_to... Frustratingly, the author titled his post "Bitcoin Private Key Necromancy" but titled his Reddit submission "I wrote a tool to pull private bitcoin keys off dead harddrives" which is a far better title. He recovered about 46 coins.
- kubiiii 13y agoIf the hardrive wont power on but the filesystem is ok you can still send it to a recovery company for something like a few hundred bucks. -Hi i've just received the data you recovered from my hard disk, thanks, but I can't find my wallet ... -Dont know what you are talking about.
- johnchristopher 13y agoLast time I checked it was more in the thousands bucks range than in the hundreds unless you are only talking about damage controller.
- kubiiii 13y agoI had a quotation for a 500 GB HD recovery a few months back, it was 400 euros (France). It was a flat rate, problem could be the controller or mechanical : same price. But I guess it depends on the company, didn't try it anyway so I dont know if it was reliable or not (no BTC on this drive!).
- yardie 13y agoI've got 2 HDDs sitting in the bottom of my freezer (notorious, Seagate 7200.9s) waiting to be recovered. If you have that contact please send it to me. I'm only finding 1500-2000euro quotes.
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- MWil 13y agoI wish this could help me recover 3 btc I had in 2010 b/c I still have the HDD. My problem is that my disk is extra dead - it stopped spinning completely. I can't use hiren's boot tools with it like I could my other dead drives. I've heard I would have to bring it into a clean room environment for about a grand and have experts recreate the drive.
- mctx 13y agoI've heard success stories of transplanting platters into the same model working drive, maybe this is worth a shot?
- ansible 13y agoI think it would be worth it first to just swap out the controller board on the bottom of the drive. If it isn't the motor itself, then that might fix the drive.
- paraxisi 13y agoI have also heard/read about a few people doing this. If I remember correctly, you need a special tool to pick the platters up out of the drive without rotating them, but aside from that just a new controller/assy.
- MWil 13y agoThanks, I hadn't really heard about this. Although at current btc prices, it might actually just be cheaper for me to claim them as "lost" on my taxes than try and recover them
- sillysaurus2 13y agoIf you're considering tossing the drive, please consider mailing it to my address instead so that I can try my hand at recovering the bitcoins. I can cover shipping costs. I'll email you in case you're interested.
- KiwiCoder 13y agoI used to be cavalier about HDD disposal, and then one day I helped a friend recover some files from their apparently dead HDD. We did not recover the files but we did find unencrypted passwords to email accounts and other sensitive information that he had forgotten about. So while I trust device/disk wiping tools are effective, I'm much less trusting of my own memory about the files on any given storage device. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly it's rarely possible to guarantee that software is consistently doing the right thing with your sensitive data. Therefore my rule is now to donate unwanted hardware but never to donate or dispose of storage devices without being certain the data is unrecoverable. This is a harder problem than it might at first appear. Secure disposal of hardware is a problem growing worse in proportion to the number of devices we allow (or by inaction permit) to manage our personal data.
- sillysaurus2 13y agodispose of storage devices while being certain the data is unrecoverable I use Derek's Boot and Nuke bootdisc for this purpose. http://www.dban.org/ http://www.dban.org/ It's straightforward to use, but it's also configurable if you want to be extra certain the data is gone. I think the default is 3 passes of filling the harddrive with random data generated via Mersenne Twister.
- omh 13y agoUnless you're very paranoid then a single pass of zeroes should be sufficient. The bigger problem is what to to with a dead hard disk. It's usually easier to buy a new one rather than replace it, but an attacker could perhaps repair the disk to steal the data. At work we send any non-wipable disk to be physically shredded. At home I think I'd just hold on to all disks indefinitely.
- maxerickson 13y agoThere's lots of ways to damage the platters, at which point the data probably won't justify exotic recovery methods. For a drive with bitcoin on it, just move the coins to new addresses before disposing of it.
- makomk 13y agoYeah, it's kind of a neat trick. I wrote a similar tool a couple of years ago though I'm not sure if it still works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0
- Shtirlic 13y agoThank you, I recovered some of my bitcoins with your tool 1 year ago.
- JorgePasada 13y agoOh cool, your that guy. Someone else brought up your tool at the meetup when we were talking about this post.
- jrochkind1 13y agoOh geez, have upworthy-style "this guy" headlines come to HN?
- chaz 13y ago"This guy" has been here for years. :) https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22this+guy%22&sortby=score+desc https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22thi...
- jheriko 13y agoi don't get it... what exactly is the criticism here?
- nashashmi 13y agoI think 'this guy' makes it similar to a notorious outbrain paid advertisement: "this guy made money sitting at home"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jheriko 13y agoi'm pretty sure that once poor or greedy people can get 'day-to-day' value out of bitcoin beyond its pure monetary value as an investment (you don't want to hold onto your stolen goods in hope they appreciate in value) then we will start having many much more serious problems with its thievery... smart and driven criminals will solve a lot of problems in ingenious ways you never thought of
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoTotally misleading post title, if you can read drive... It isn't dead... Got it?
- graemian 13y agoDoesn't work for Bitcoin Wallet on Android :-( I lost some Bitcoins on an old phone that used Bitcoin Wallet (https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet) by doing "Settings > Reset". I tried using this app to find them by dumping the /data partition, but no luck. Apparently it uses a different wallet format: The wallet file format is not compatible to wallet.dat (Satoshi client). Rather, it uses a custom protobuf format which should be compatible between clients using bitcoinj. Any ideas on how to find such coins?
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI like a good challenge. Would you send me a dump of the phone's harddrive? The command to dump the harddrive is `dd if=/dev/hda1 of=./phone.image` Then I'll examine the bitcoinj wallet format and write a tool to search for the private key within the phone.image file. My email's in my profile.
- ge0rg 13y agoHaha, this is a nice try :D
- romaniv 13y agoI lost some Bitcoins on an old phone that used Bitcoin Wallet (https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet) by doing "Settings > Reset". That sounds like remarkably horrible UI design. Being purely digital and having no institutional overhead, Bitcoin seems to "uncover" a lot of security and design problem in modern apps.
- graemian 13y agoIt was an Android "Settings > Reset", not from within the app
- ansible 13y agoIt may have made a new filesystem and written that to your NAND Flash or eMMC drive partition. So the filesystem itself won't contain any old data. Depending on the type of filesystem used, it may have walked through all the blocks of the NAND Flash, erased them, and then marked them as 'ready for use'. If you are very serious about this, your best bet is to (A) stop using the phone now, (B) dump the raw partition contents using the Android tools. The situation might be better or worse if the phone uses eMMC, but the above holds. The chip itself does the Flash management (wear leveling, bad block detection, etc.). So it can hide more, but there may be leftover data from the old /data partition still in the unused blocks.
- nullc 13y agoWhy would they spend time trying all those things and reinventing the wheel when a tool for doing exactly this has existed since time immortal (in bitcoin terms): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0