Tesla BrainWallet traps from Bitcoin wallets beware of phishing and popular passphrases

There are many forms to create a Bitcoin wallet. One of the first methods to create a Bitcoin wallet was known as  BrainWallet .
BrainWallet convenient in the sense that it allows you to store in memory or in a notebook  » passphrase « . The passphrase is hashed using an algorithm  SHA-256, and is used as the seed to generate the  private key .

Due to their popularity and ease of use, many  BrainWallet over the past few years have been used with weak passphrases.

This weak private key generation method allowed attackers to steal quite a lot of coins  BTCby simply cracking the password against the hashes stored on the blockchain. Although this attack has been known for many years, it has become widely known  в 2015 году thanks to the work done by  Ryan Castellucci

August 7, 2015

Ryan Castellucci spoke at  DEFCON23  about cracking  BrainWallet passwords . Although passphrases had been in  BrainWallet use for many years by this point, the conversation helped bring these issues to the wider public.

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Document  [ PDF] :  Cracking Cryptocurrency Brainwallets Ryan Castellucci

Ryan has published the results of his work on hacking  BrainWallet in conjunction with a tool called the  BrainFlayer Proven Cryptocurrency Wallet Cracker  BrainWallet) and other low-entropy algorithms.

GPU ACCELERATION

At the moment  пробный cracker , Ryan’s  brainflayer has been  upgraded into various software, utilities, scripts,  and the like , but a graphics accelerator has still been created   to  support the GPUBrainWallet  runtime  . These accelerators are called  TeslaBrainWallet , after the family of NVIDIA® Tesla® V100  computing systems  .

Phishing

Many Bitcoin advocates often cite  BrainWallet as a good method of protecting funds from possible confiscation, but unfortunately there are many pitfalls for  Bitcoin клиента Electrum.

Although it  Electrum supports all popular hardware wallets  (for example,  Trezor,  Ledger etc.)  Up to installing third-party plugins to expand the functionality of the wallet, but if you install an old version of the Bitcoin wallet, you may run the risk of losing all cryptocurrency coins in the wallet.

This trap is popular under the word  "фишинг". There are a lot of sad stories in the crypto community. One of the biggest losses from phishing in the amount 1400 BTC (16 миллионов долларов США)

According to the crypto industry portal  «CryptoPotato»

Biggest Phishing Loss of 1,400 BTC ($16 million)

An anonymous bitcoin investor by name  «1400BitcoinStolen» claimed on Sunday that he lost  1400 BTC after «stupidly» installing an old version of the popular wallet  Electrum, but it turned out to be a  phishing scam .

Trap:

Explaining the unpleasant incident, the victim said that he could not access the funds  с 2017 года. After setting up the wallet and trying to transfer  1 BTC , he received a pop-up message asking him to update his security system before he could transfer. Unfortunately it was a  trap — a phishing  attempt  . According to the victim, he  installed the update , and all his funds were automatically transferred to the hackers’ wallet address, which made the scammers richer  на 16 миллионов долларов США.

How to avoid becoming a victim of phishing?

In our early posts, we strongly recommend to everyone:

• use only proven software;
• see the source code;
• do the assembly yourself;
• do an update;

Weak passphrases

Let’s move on to the experimental part:

Open  [TerminalGoogleColab] .

Let’s use the «13TeslaBrainWallet» repository  .

git clone https://github.com/demining/CryptoDeepTools.git

cd CryptoDeepTools/13TeslaBrainWallet/

ls

Install pip2 for Python 2.7

(because from September 20, 2022  Google Colab does not use  "pip2" the default for  "Python 2.7")

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/pip/2.7/get-pip.py

sudo python2 get-pip.py

Install the ECDSA cryptographic signature library

pip2 install ecdsa

Run Python script: teslaBTC.py

History of weak passphrases with a positive balance of BTC coins

Let’s open bitaddress and   check:

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python2 teslaBTC.py "arretonprimaryschool"

Pass phrase: arretonprimaryschool
Private key: 0e57a34ee4cf2242bc331494981aa896e803c598cc4a0f890b2e85d6acb85f29
Bitcoin address: 16jLdtAxgXVwcG93MyPcNALXMCv3D6dyDB

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python2 teslaBTC.py "correct horse battery staple"

Pass phrase: correct horse battery staple
Private key: c4bbcb1fbec99d65bf59d85c8cb62ee2db963f0fe106f483d9afa73bd4e39a8a
Bitcoin address U: 1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T
Bitcoin address C: 1C7zdTfnkzmr13HfA2vNm5SJYRK6nEKyq8

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python2 teslaBTC.py "This is the way the world ends."

Pass phrase: This is the way the world ends.
Private key: 1bad2815705c693b4df94badf0f757c601d841bff62c40f9546432034a4c29b7
Bitcoin address: 1DnqpnCFiXqMhvRfdRzPcRao7yxyoeXgjf

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python2 teslaBTC.py "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

Pass phrase: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Private key: d7a8fbb307d7809469ca9abcb0082e4f8d5651e46d3cdb762d02d0bf37c9e592
Bitcoin address: 13w4Hn1BJQM4bjZZgYtXpyp4cioiw29tKj

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python2 teslaBTC.py "just let the lovin take ahold"

Pass phrase: just let the lovin take ahold
Private key: 5e6fa5565782e85f3e305c422388e687e4fc8c2e7c572748f57ff7a4d6ff736a
Bitcoin address: 1H6nTPQ8wqdQ3QFrGc1qy9r63acpTAkwvc

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python2 teslaBTC.py "en un lugar de la mancha"

Pass phrase: en un lugar de la mancha
Private key: e9f852cd97283461e254da265a27d2bda07f245cb5f8a6ee622355fcec63eb8c
Bitcoin address: 1Gwd5BQCDsFrEvokGkto945smazwEMKqdo

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python2 teslaBTC.py "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

Pass phrase: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Private key: 68b1282b91de2c054c36629cb8dd447f12f096d3e3c587978dc2248444633483
Bitcoin address: 1E2Wgex1ZGfZ9gb4MBubJJ5bnABkk2pbZf

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python2 teslaBTC.py "Thats what she said 1974"

Pass phrase: Thats what she said 1974
Private key: 0e3630f0f829d93afd8569f7c50aaced3d930353db8468d8c42b58d7f5ce1fdb
Bitcoin address: 113W1qXf6DsJFtqMnR53tqvLrVfjkjR7g5

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python2 teslaBTC.py "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"

Pass phrase: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Private key: 2f8586076db2559d3e72a43c4ae8a1f5957abb23ca4a1f46e380dd640536eedb
Bitcoin address: 1KRGyNbq2yM1vAXscib74Snp6AUuUHVi2g

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Literature:

• International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security «The Bitcoin Brain Drain: Examining the Use and Abuse of Bitcoin Brain Wallets» [ Marie Vasek, Joseph Bonneau, Ryan Castellucci, Cameron Keith ] ., 2017

This video was created for the  CRYPTO DEEP TECH portal  to ensure the financial security of data and cryptography on elliptic curves  secp256k1 against weak signatures  ECDSA in cryptocurrency BITCOIN

Source

Telegram :  https://t.me/cryptodeeptech

Video: https://youtu.be/r0fTtBDWTnw

Source: https://cryptodeeptech.ru/tesla-brainwallet

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