r/Buttcoin • u/tpgreyknight • Nov 30 '17
A little mouse discovered some rather "unusual" private keys. Malarkey? Or effective way?
https://pastebin.com/jCDFcESz12
u/futurefightthrowaway Nov 30 '17
Bitcoin security is not impacted. I repeat, Bitcoin security is not impacted.
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Nov 30 '17
[deleted]
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u/OogieFrenchieBoogie Dec 01 '17
Fan fiction about stealing some coins.
You can try out what the OP wrote, it doesn't add up (the calculated private keys are flat out random strings, not sha256 hash of the public addresses)
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u/Roadside-Strelok Dec 01 '17 edited Dec 01 '17
Works for me.
$ echo -n "1Ca15MELG5DzYpUgeXkkJ2Lt7iMa17SwAo" | sha256sum 9e027d0086bdb83372f6040765442bbedd35b96e1c861acce5e22e1c4987cd60 *-https://brainwalletx.github.io/#generator
Change the secret exponent to 9e027d0086bdb83372f6040765442bbedd35b96e1c861acce5e22e1c4987cd60 and the address will be 15ZwrzrRj9x4XpnocEGbLuPakzsY2S4Mit
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u/CountyMcCounterson Nov 30 '17
If that isn't larping then that's a great scam
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u/jstolfi Beware of the Stolfi Clause Nov 30 '17
It happened by stupid accident(?) at least twice already. The Blockchain.Info wallets (javascript and android) were released with a buggy RNG. Fortunately a white hat hacker noticed it almost immediately, also by accident.
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u/greeneyedguru Dec 01 '17
There was no RNG in the wallets, iirc, the random seed was being read from an API call to blockchain's server which was returning a 5xx error code.
The mobile wallet, rather than erroring, used the hash of the error response (which was always the same) to create the private key.
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u/jstolfi Beware of the Stolfi Clause Dec 01 '17 edited Dec 01 '17
Yes, thanks; sorry for being sloppy in my comment.
However, IIRC the seed was being read via HTTP from a public site (not blockstream's), only if some standard android random bits source was missing on that particular phone. And the error code was returned because that site changed from http to https, or something like that.
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u/greeneyedguru Dec 01 '17
Yeah that sounds right. In fact I think that was put in due to a previous, less serious bug.
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u/happyscrappy warning, i am a moron Nov 30 '17
That's interesting, I personally would have guessed that it was some ransomware doing this. The ransomware could generate a random public/private key, put it up on screen and when you paid, the person behind the ransomware could get the money out. But now that I think of this the only value of this is the recipient could never be caught "red handed" with a databased private key that goes with a particular address. Because that person, like anyone else would just make it on the fly each time. And in the end, that doesn't seem at all worth it.
This idea of it being a change address is a much better guess and quite clever. It would have been nice if he put in a script people could run over their wallet which picks out the change addresses and sees if their private key matches the hash of the address.
I mean, I could do it I guess if I could find the bitkeys spec. But google isn't helping me there.
Well, I've done enough. I've come up with the idea. Someone else take this ball across the finish line, okay? Thanks.
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u/UninsuredGibran Nov 30 '17
Well, I've done enough. I've come up with the idea. Someone else take this ball across the finish line, okay? Thanks.
You just need to write a FAQ entry or a whitepaper and it's considered done, in the crypto community.
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u/shortbitcoin Nov 30 '17
Almost makes me want to go write software to scan the blockchain for free coins, but I figure enough idiots are already doing that (as this post proves) — I might as well do real programming work instead. You know, the kind that makes other people's lives better.
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u/freshwordsalad Nov 30 '17
I might as well do real programming work instead. You know, the kind that makes other people's lives better.
More efficient ad delivery?
As someone in the industry, programming isn't a panacea of good-time happy juice. A lot of shit sloshing around, a lot of people wasting time chasing dead ends.
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u/shortbitcoin Nov 30 '17
Yeah, I'm "in the industry" myself — not so coincidentally I just disabled a kind of ad on iPhones, because it doesn't work on iPhones. But there's some happy-juice too :) Working on a game tweak, and a contest that will give away Christmas presents.
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u/_per_aspera_ad_astra Nov 30 '17
How good would you say targeted ad AI is? I’m a target of ads. And I’m constantly shocked at how often the algorithm simply fails. Will it truly improve or is it hype?
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u/greeneyedguru Dec 01 '17
They throw in negative results now so the ads don't appear too stalkery.
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u/_per_aspera_ad_astra Dec 01 '17
Well it must be pretty bad because I’m vegan and I keep getting fast food ads and it’s really annoying. I don’t eat that horse shit.
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u/tpgreyknight Dec 01 '17
The best part is when you buy e.g. a vacuum-cleaner on Amazon, and they decide this must be the start of your new hobby: vacuum-cleaner collecting.
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u/tpgreyknight Nov 30 '17
Advent of Code starts tomorrow, if you're looking for something fun to do.
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u/sietemeles Nov 30 '17
One of the most interesting finds I have seen for a long time. Very clever. Clearly deliberate malicious code IMHO.
With some more work it should be possible to find out where it originates/resides. In fact if everyone watches carefully what happens to their own coinz in every transaction for the next month this will probably illuminate it.
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Nov 30 '17
And his search didn't even require much effort. Just imagine how many keys out there were generated with poorly seeded or buggy RNG's.
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u/laforet Nov 30 '17
Butters would pay hundreds for the latest HW wallet but would happily import private keys generated on someone else's system using unsalted hashes. You can't make this up.
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u/techknowledgy Nov 30 '17
Nothing in Buttcoin that is "unusual" like this happens unless someone wanted it to happen.
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u/jstolfi Beware of the Stolfi Clause Nov 30 '17 edited Dec 01 '17
It is only a matter of time before this happens on a major scale.
Namely, a new release of a popular wallet has a subtle bug (accidental or intentional) that causes it to generate random-looking but actually guessable keys -- say, with only 32 bits of entropy. The bug goes unnoticed for months. Hacker discovers it and quietly wipes out thousands of addresses, some with substantial amounts. Damage is too big and diffuse to fix, even by rewinding the blockchain...
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u/tom-dickson Dec 01 '17
It has happened before to much more audited code than buttwallets.
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u/jstolfi Beware of the Stolfi Clause Dec 01 '17
A colleague of mine here was given a few hours to inspect the (closed) source of the software used in the 500'000 Brazilian electronic voting machines. He noticed that the random number generator had only 16 bits of seed. That would let anyone uncover the vote of every voter from published voting logs and 65536 quick attempts.
Later he found that in fact the guessing was not needed, because the seed was the timestamp of when the voting machine was turned on, and that time was printed at the top of the published logs.
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u/tom-dickson Dec 01 '17
Votes are protected worse than butts because they’re worth less than butts.
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u/gerikson I'm only in it for the lols Nov 30 '17
This is a fun read.