I hacked an Ethereum wallet and took all the money!

2259 sats \ 28 comments \ @raw_avocado 17 Jan bitcoin

1st of all this was a bounty. I DID NOT STEAL THE ETH :D

Check Twitter and I am tagged in an Ethereum post, Only used Ethereum 2 times, initially not interested.

The pictures are clues to a BIP39 seed which unlocks 0.1 ETH Ok, let me take another look.

https://twitter.com/ShareblockHolmz/status/1515361323449827358

As all the words are from the 2048 BIP39 Dictionary. I took a guess for each picture and checked if it was in the dictionary. Found 11, not sure about the 4th. But it's one of the 2048 words, so I just need to try all of them. Easy job for a computer :p

Enter Seed Savior - Brute forces 1 word. I just pasted the words I know and it showed all the possible valid 4th word. As I know the address, I just have to search for it here. Got 138 valid 4th words ,but my address is not present.. At least 1 of my guesses is wrong.

https://3rditeration.github.io/mnemonic-recovery/src/index.html

Now really want to find the seed! I went through each of the 2048 BIP39 words and looked to see if it matched any of the pictures. It took 2 hours, to redo the list .🥲 Now I have multiple options for each position. I have to hurry, this is public, others may be trying.

5 million options are not that many. I just need the right tool.

Enter BTCRecover A command line tool that I can tell it how to mix the words, and check if they generate the address I'm looking for. https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover

My Mac M1 tries 90,000 seeds/second Took 1 min, but NO LUCK!

This means that at least one of the possible words is incorrect. So on one of the positions, I need to try all the 2048 words. I will have 2048 options on that position. Positions 4,6 I'm least sure of. 6 days is too slow, others may also be trying to crack the seed!

What if I use all 3 of my laptops. Together they try 170,000 seeds/second. Nearly a 2x improvement. I cut it down from 6 days to 3 days. Need a bigger improvement, other may be cracking as I am! My laptops are all cracking using their CPU. I need GPUs, a lot of GPUs!

There are 2 ways to do more calculations per second:

get hardware that can calculate faster
get more of the same hardware and run it in parallel.

A GPU is basically a LOT of tiny weak processors that run in parallel and that is why some things run faster on GPUs.

Luckily there are websites where people allow you to rent their powerful computers and you pay per minute. I used https://vast.ai/i as seemed to be the cheapest option. Prices range from $0.3 to $1 (for my needs) Pretty much all have strong processors, ones with more GPUs cost more.

Ended up renting 16 servers and I was trying 1,096,000 seeds per second. It would take 11 hours to try all my candidate words, and on the 4th & 12th positions try all 2048 possible words. So pressed start and got some much-needed sleep.

Woke up and Seed not found. Angry and disappointed, I closed all the servers, as it cost me money to keep them up. But then I looked through the list one more time, and wait a minute 8 is not a park, it's Hard Street. Could it be?

Used initial list of candidate words, but hard on the 8th position. 4 minutes later SEED FOUND!1!1

When you take out the server costs and donation to the person who maintains the tool, I was left with ~$50.

Best 50 bucks I ever made in my life. (10 days of continuous work)

Clarifications

I left tout a LOT of things to keep it short but to enumerate a few:

everything took multiple trees and a LOT of hair pulling
BTCRecover does not paralilise all the operations when generating addresses
when splitting the work between servers it slowed down the tool, i had to write a script and manually split the work between servers

The 1st pic in the thread was taken right after I found the seed, when I posted by "victory" on twitter, but the screenshots of the commands I re-ran after when I was documenting the process. https://twitter.com/raw_avocado/status/1520988465625710593

Usually I share a Bitcoin story, but I though my only Ethereum story is interesting enough to share. Also in case it's not obvious, everything I've done here applies to Bitcoin also, I mean its BIP32 & BIP39.

I tweet 1 interesting Bitcoin fact/day and you can find it here(long form gets posted here on SN): https://twitter.com/raw_avocado/status/1743414238654201869

And the #BitcoinFactOfTheDay is brought to you by BitBox.

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67 sats \ 4 replies \ @Fabs 17 Jan

Looks like you've got the tenacity I tend to lack every-so-often.

Walks up to OP and pats him on his shoulder while tipping his fedora in a slightly uncanny way

Good job, OP.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

Thank you , kind Sir.

24 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 17 Jan

No problem,

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

Thank you , kind Sir.

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 17 Jan

OP.

47 sats \ 1 reply \ @piecover 17 Jan

That's funny

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

55 sats \ 1 reply \ @DiedOnTitan 18 Jan

Well done. What a fun challenge! It is clear you learned a lot, and I appreciate that you listed all of the tools you used to solve the puzzle so that others can learn. Cheers!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 18 Jan

Cheer, bud.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @ladyluck 18 Jan

Sound like what hackers do, ethical hackers that is

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @yfaming 18 Jan

Wow! It's so cool!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 18 Jan

Cheers.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Nuttall 17 Jan

Nice work.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

Cheers.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @justBrian 17 Jan

Interesting, and congrats 🙂

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

Thanks, bud.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @turker 18 Jan

Congrats to you! Even this storys all about ETH, we can take key lessons from this situation for Bitcoin too.

Don't save your mnemonic online
Don't save your mnemonic on a devices that can connect internet
Even if you have fractions of mnemonic words, people can find it. Just takes time and effort. I'm not pro but I think using 24 words mnemonic will be safer than using 12 words mnemonic right? Also, that is interesting that no one found this before you without a technic. I guess the 4th word is written with one of the stock MS Office fonts. If you find those characters on a font file (or do OCR) and change the font to Calibri, I guess you can see that word. I wish I see this bounty before 😄

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @brave 18 Jan

You must be a genius to be able to apply logic and reason thus far

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 18 Jan

Can't tell if you are mocking me or giving me a compliment.

10 sats \ 8 replies \ @Eobard 17 Jan

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10 sats \ 4 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @Bitcoinisawesome 17 Jan

you made a post about a shitcoin in the bitcoin territory.

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall 17 Jan

Bip39 is a BITCOIN problem and solution. So everything that he did could be done to a Bitcoin private key address. He educated me as to the amount of effort it would take if my seed words were found and maybe I obfuscated the order thinking I was clever..

This is good work and but no means is it advertising the shitcoin.

This was BIP39 exercise. If someone gets your private key they can watch all the addresses you use and one day make a fat transaction.

41 sats \ 1 reply \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

I understand this is not obvious to novice Bitcoiners(though it should) so I'll explain.

The post does not discuss anything particular feature of Ethereum, it talks about BIP32 & BIP38, BITCOIN Improvement Proposal. These both dictate how to generate keys in hierarchical orders and respectively how to encode the entropy. They are used in almost every single wallet out there. Because of their structure, these support other coins, as a subaccount of your main seed.

This is the same exact cryptography that secures your Bitcoins right now.

I am very well aware of what territory this is, and how reads stacker news, and I think it's a perfectly valid post, as it informs how key management is done.

Your response shows incredible ignorance.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bitcoinisawesome 18 Jan

I certainly won’t deny any incredible level of ignorance however I was only adding words to the emoji you questioned.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @satoshiplanet 17 Jan

80 sats \ 0 replies \ @raw_avocado OP 17 Jan

That is definitely not true, and I really don't know why anything thinks that would even be a good thing.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Eobard 17 Jan

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