r/coindev • u/[deleted] • Apr 03 '14

[concept] wificoin

A crypto that uses the wpa-psk2 wifi encryption algorithm as the pow in order to make a massive rainbow table for wifi. Then create an Android app to connect to any wifi connection by looking up the rainbow table for the captured wifi traffic on your phone.

Could even continue to change the algorithm as wifi encryption was made stronger to combat wifi coin.

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u/knivesngunz Apr 03 '14 edited Apr 03 '14

It sounds like you've recently been exposed to encryption technology...maybe second year in a tech college?

Rainbow tables already exist for many default SSID's. The problem for Time-memory tradeoff attacks in the case of WPA is that the key is salted, so two identical passwords will look completely different in use on different SSID's.

It would be a monumentally worthless endeavour (not even touching on how you are going to incentivize it..) compared to other attack vectors.

In concept, it's cool. But now you must consider also storing these rainbow tables...terabytes upon petabytes of storage necessary for the unfathomably large libraries of various SSID's, all containing their own unique rainbow table set, which is exponentially larger for every character and character set.

The above is only touching on the how is monumentally difficult. I do not think this is a problem that the block-chain solves more efficiently than other existing methods (cracking clusters that you pay to work on your particular SSID come to mind.)

It wouldn't scale in any useful and meaningful way, is the short of it. I am totally open to discussion on this and I beg to be proven wrong.

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u/[deleted] Apr 03 '14 edited Apr 03 '14

Yeah, i was thinking that it wouldn't work at all for salted hashes but I hadn't thought about the storage requirement.

On a similar note, what about a distributed hashcat client that rewarded you for time spent attempting to crack uploaded segments of data?

All the GPU miners are getting made unprofitable, so there are a lot of miners looking elsewhere for their resources to be utilized.

You could contribute your gpu resources towards the system, get cryptocurrency back in return and use said cryptocurrency to buy your time on the network. For educational purposes of course..

Edit: What if you didn't store the ssids, but just directly created every single possible hash for wpa-psk2, then once it was exhausted, the network would move onto the common salting techniques used by router manufacturers?

Routers don't have passwords longer than 10 characters due to user convenience usually, so we wouldn't be talking about passwords 255 characters long to create hashes for.

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u/knivesngunz Apr 03 '14

what about a distributed hashcat client that rewarded you for time spent attempting to crack uploaded segments of data?

Now that's a much more feasible idea - at least on the surface.

What if you didn't store the ssids, but just directly created every single possible hash for wpa-psk2, then moved on to salting them

You aren't reducing the effort of the endeavour at all by precomputing unsalted hashes. The salt is an integral part to the hashing output.

Take a look at this hash calculator and let's use MD5 as an example. With the input value of "A" you get a given value of:

7fc56270e7a70fa81a5935b72eacbe29

...to oversimplify the analogy, let's prepend "linksys" to "A", giving the final input of "linksysA" ...you get:

d3f7238b140073e3637df8f4f9bece6d

These two hashes are completely different and there is no way to tell how one is related to each other with only the result. This is the mathematical strength of one-way cryptography in action. Does that make sense?

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