New Cracking Tool Exposes Major Flaw in Bitcoin Brainwallets
A white-hat hacker has released a new tool designed to illustrate the ease with which illicit actors can steal bitcoins from brainwallets, a type of bitcoin wallet iteration where passwords are not stored digitally - but in the memory of the user. Originally conceived as a way to keep sensitive wallet data offline and make bitcoin addresses easier to remember, the brainwallet was partly undone due to how it interacts with the bitcoin blockchain. A brainwallet uses a single, long password or phrase, converts it to a private key, a public key and finally an address. Using an offline attack,....
Related News
With 2 bitcoins available to be won, Kryptokit contest tests new blockchain based marketing ideas. TORONTO, CANADA - SEPTEMBER 23, 2014 - Today Kryptokit, the makers of the instant bitcoin wallet RushWallet, launched a video with a twist: embedded in the humorous video is a series of clues that lead viewers to 30 hidden brainwallets filled with bitcoins. Once viewers decipher the clues they are invited to claim the wallets and transfer any bitcoins inside them into their own accounts. There are 2 bitcoins available to be won in a contest that will last 1 month or until all the wallets are....
In February, electric car maker Tesla announced it had purchased $1.5bn in Bitcoin. Along with the announcement was a commitment, they would also accept BTC as payment, making it the first car manufacturer to do so. The firm followed through with that pledge. As of yesterday, using Bitcoin to buy directly from Tesla became a […]
Here is a reality check for all the Bitcoin naysayers, the most widely used conventional electronic payment system – credit/debit cards are not really as secure as we had earlier thought. A serious protocol level flaw exposed by a couple of German security experts bares it all. It is not just the security flaw one has to be concerned about, but also the banks’ apathy towards fixing it! A recent report carried by well-known Russian media channel, Russia Today describes the serious security flaw in POS terminals. According to Karsten Nohl, one of the security experts from the Berlin based....
The crypto world just got another painful reminder: keeping your assets in the wrong place can be an expensive mistake. This time, 1inch, a popular decentralized exchange aggregator, has fallen victim to a $5M hack. The culprit? A vulnerability in the Fusion v1 smart contract. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it happens all too […]
A “brainwallet” refers to a private key that is stored in the user’s memory in the form of a seed phrase or a passphrase.