Welcome

The goal of this blog is to motivate myself and others for further practice as well as provide details that might explain what's going on..


Monday, January 8, 2018

Picking my own pockets

Bought some bitcoins and peercoins 3.5 years ago. The price had increased more than 10x and I thought it's about time to sell the bitcoins and distribute to other cryptocurrencies. Especially since bitcoin has become very volatile and the bubble is probably going to burst in 2018. Good idea, but .. back then I encrypted all the wallets and purposefully did not write down the passwords. Or rather, I did write down passwords but made sure that all of the written passwords were a distraction. Forgot the passwords soon enough. On the positive side, they were safe =). Tried meditating on it a few times every year, hoping that I would remember the passwords. It happened several times that I remembered a password and thought it's the correct one. Tried, but to no avail. Had basically given up on it - a pretty small sum anyway. Ended up with a dictionary file with all the passwords that I had tried.
Explored the wallet formats a bit, downloaded a more recent version of hashcat, installed the OpenCL drivers for CPU and tried the dictionary. It took less than a second to force the bitcoin wallet because I had actually guessed the password with one of my meditation sessions but I had accidentally tested it against the peercoin wallet, which didn't work, obviously. I remembered that my bitcoin wallet password was the more complex one, and that I didn't even bother memorizing the peercoin password. Ironically, the peercoin wallet was so simple that I wouldn't have even tried it. JackTheRipper, princeprocessor and hashcat helped to crack it in about 10 minutes.

No comments:

Post a Comment