Bitcoin password cracking
There are no known flaws in the implementations, and many people have tried to break them! This service is designed right from the start to be a scalable solution - it runs on a cluster of high performance Linux boxes, hosted on the Amazon EC2 cloud. This enables us to scale up to nearly any number of computing cores. We have tested this with up to 8-core computers, but more can be brought online if required. Some of the wallet encryption formats are suitable for solving on GPU video card hardware.
In these instances, we have hand-crafted highly optimized GPU software to provide huge speed advantages. The algorithms used to generate the password permutations are proprietary, but are designed to be flexible in order to handle unusual requirements. The encryption used by the Bitcoin-core wallets is much harder to break than most encryption schemes. This is why an optimized, distributed, specialized program is required to attempt large numbers of brute force decryption attempts. We support hardware wallets such as Trezor and Ledger.
We support brain wallets and BIP38 encoded wallets too. The full list is here. Should you trust us with your wallet? If you send us your wallet, and we decrypt the password, then it would be possible for us to steal the money that the wallet holds. Fortunately, the design of the bitcoin-core wallet is such that you can send us just part of the wallet information.
The part you send us allows us to decrypt the wallet, without giving us any opportunity to steal your money. See various detailed explanations on the bitcoin wallet design google them. Refer to the wallets page for more detailed information.
Select your location and press "Continue" and on the next screen, select a mirror location - the first option is fine likely ftp. Lastly you will be asked for proxy information. If you have a proxy, enter it, otherwise, leave blank. During this setup process, the installation will automatically grab the latest file versions from the internet. The process will take some time to complete. You will then be asked to enable "popularity-contents".
It's your choice but I would suggest "No". Under "Software selection," only select "Debian desktop environment" and Standard system utilities. The install will run for some time. You will now be asked to confirm that you want to install GRUB boot loader. Select "Yes" and press "Continue". The install process is now complete! This should be done automatically but it may not have been.
To confirm that the ISO is unmounted, right click on the circled icon shown in the above image - if remove disk from virtual drive is greyed out, you are good to go. Otherwhise, click that option and the disc icon will be greyed out. Proceed to press "Continue". The virtual computer will now reboot. Be patient and wait for a login screen. Upon the bootup screen, the correct installation will boot automatically!
If this is all too much for you, we offer a Powerful Password Recovery Service. Click here for more information. Now that Debian is installed and running, every time the virtual OS starts, you will be prompted to login. Simply click on your username and enter the password you entered during the installation process. For me, the username is cracker and the password is cracker. Welcome to your workspace.
Unfortuntely, we will not be spending much time here. Let's open a Root Terminal. You will be prompted for a password.
If you entered a root password from the inital install, enter that here. Otherwhise your root password will be the same as the user password that you just used to login. First thing we need to do is install VirtualBox "Guest Extensions" software. You then may be prompted with a confirm screen. Select "Run" - ignore any errors. Now proceed to restart the virtual box by clicking on the username in the upper right corner - in the image above, the username is "cracker".
Go to shutdown and restart. You should now be able to copy and paste text back and forth from your primary OS and the virtual environment. Once the virtual environment comes back online and you login, open a terminal as root same as step 5.
First let's look at what directory you are in. If you have only entered what was typed in this guide you should be there. This code will make a copy of the current John The Ripper release using all updates as of Execute the following code and we will begin compiling John The Ripper. If you are only using one core for John The Ripper, you can skip this step but for most, this is important!
Before we complile John The Ripper, we need to make some changes to the configuration. Enter the following command to edit the configuration file:. After this command, you should see the above screen. This is the instructions for how to build John The Ripper. Before we proceed, you need to be careful to only modify the following settings unless of course you know what you are doing.
It's nothing like word. Think notepad but without the use of a mouse. The purple circle in the above example shows where your cursor currently is.
To navigate the file, you will use the arrow keys. You will want to use the down arrow key to get to the correct line and make the below changes. Scroll down the file using the down arrow until you get to the line that says. With version downloaded on , it is line Simply remove the pound symbol in front of the line so it reads - to do this, simply place your cursor on the pound symbol and press the delete key once.
We now need to save and close the configuration file. You should now be returned to the terminal prompt. If successful, you will have something like the image above. The area in the purple square shows a successful test of John The Ripper. It was able to process Like I said, it's a very slow process. The inital test however only used one CPU core so if you have multiple cores, you can multiply the text number by core count.
Also remember, depending on the speed of the computer on which the wallet was originally encrypted, the faster or slower the decryption process. John The Ripper is extremely configurable.
In this guide, we are going to look at just the basics to get you going. In the list below, every location that says "cracker" is the usernamed used in the inital setup part 2. If you used a different username to setup Debian, replace that name with cracker. Let's break this down before we continue.
In the above line, we are calling John The Ripper and giving four options to utilize. Please also notice the space between each option. While John The Ripper is running, press the "q" key. It will shut down but can be resumed at a later date.
While writing this article, I forgot my new bitcoin wallet address - luckily there are no coins in it but it's a great example for you to test with. I thought my password was GoBitGo but it's not. I likely mistyped a character. Can you crack the password? This test cracking is an important step. It will confrim that your virtual environment is properly working and has the ability to potentially crack your password.
To test this process, you will need a copy of the encrypted wallet and a word list that I generated to find the password. The wordlist is , passwords long but fear not, the correct answer is between line 25, and 30, which should not take too long to find - even with one CPU core. This list was created using a double replace method and has over 2,, passwords.
I cut it into a quater to make it a smaller download. The below guide will use the files from above to test John The Ripper. When you are ready to crack your own wallet, simply replace the files from this guide with your own.
The decryption program does not care about your wallet file - what it does care about is your wallet's private key. There are multiple ways to extract the private key but for this example, we will ask John The Ripper to do so. If you choose to do so another way, you can skip the following step and just place it in an empty document on the virtual environment. We now need to get the required files into the virtual environment. In previous steps, we setup the environment with "Guest Additions" which allow us to drag and drop files directly into the virtual environment tas well as supporting copy and paste.
Unfortunately, you can not just drag and drop files directly onto the virtual environment desktop well, you can but you will have to change some settings of Gnome - this is the Linux GUI. We will need to open the File Manager. This will open the file manager. You can then drag and drop your files directly into this file manager.
Please also make sure you are in the home folder inside the file manager. In the image above, the folder location is in the blue square. If you are not under the home directory, click on "Home" on the left side of the file manager. If for some reason you could not drag and drop your files into the file manager and Guest Additions are not working, I would suggest either:.
Now that we have the requried files on the virtual environment, we are ready to extract the private key from your wallet file. To do so, in the terminal, enter. Your wallet key will be saved in the file named wallet hash. If you want to verify this has worked, you can open this file by entering.
It will display the following from the test wallet - your personal wallet will have a different hash. Please enter your desired amount but it can not be more than the amount of cores you have on your computer.
If everything works, you will see the above image. Now, it's time to be patient. If you want to check the status, make sure you have the terminal as the active running application just click on it and press any key.
You will then be given the information of each CPU core - how fast, how far through the list and current active line from the wordlist. In the above example, you can see we are running 4 CPU cores and the cores are ranging from When John The Ripper finds the password, it will show it. Above is an example with the found password - I placed it in the purple box for you to see. There you have it! Even after it finds the password, the program will keep running on the other cores until it comes to the same conclusion.
Some of you will notice that other CPU cores will find the password as well and you may be thinking that the program is overlapping on each core but the timing does not work out to that conclusion. What I believe is happening is once the password is found on a core, that core shuts down but the program does not update that the specific line as checked.
It's likely a programming bug but should not interfere with the process. This is possibly the most important step! Unfortuntely, this is not a one size fits all solution. When we look at password decryption, we ask for the most likley to least likey password canidate and they are often very similar but not close enough for a universal solution. I often find myself creating a custom program creating a unique list of potential passwords to first try.
With that said, the below program can very well find your password if it was a simple typing error. The program was not created by GoBitGo but rather I found it online here.
It has been modified to create a list of potential passwords and place them in a file ready for John The Ripper. S Dollars, Bitcoins or Litecoins. We will generate your password list usually within 72 hours. If you later hire us to decrypt your password, and we are successful, this amount will be credited back to you.
Email us at info gobitgo. To use this program, first you will need to download it via the above link WordListGenerator.
Once downloaded, place it in your virtual terminals file managers Home folder. It's the same instructions as to section 6. You will now need to enter what you thought your pass phrase s is. Once uploaded, go to your terminal and enter. This is the list of what you thought the password could be.
You can enter any amount of possibilities here. The formatting needs to however stay the same. Each potential password needs to placed in apostrophes with a comma separating each possibility and no comma at the end.
But what if you think your password may contain an apostrophe? Simply add a back slash behind it. Here is an example of a single potential password and it contains an apostrophe:. To run the program:. If you got this far, you've already executed a cracking command. All you need to do is follow step 5 again, except this time, you are not going to upload a wordlist file since you created one on the server. Step 2 - Change your wallet passphrase.
Your current wallet can potentially be a security risk. By changing the password, it invalidates the old wallet. Step 3 - Figure out a good solution, specific to you, for storing your wallet file and passphrase. You can use a paper wallet, save the passphrase on a flash drive and the wallet on another drive, write down the passphrase and save it somewhere safe. To be honest, you are one of the lucky ones - this will not work for eveyone and you do not want to go through this again!
It took quite a bit of time and energy to create this tutorial. This is also a decryption process that we, and others, charge for. I believe information should be free and dare I say open source!
I do also believe that if you have gotten any value from it, that value should be shared.