Michael Keep, a former software program engineer with Google and the present CTO of sensible contract and decentralized software (Dapp) agency, Py
Michael Keep, a former software program engineer with Google and the present CTO of sensible contract and decentralized software (Dapp) agency, Pyrofex, claims to have efficiently hacked a zipper file containing the non-public keys to over $300,000 in Bitcoin (BTC).
In a weblog submit, Keep says that his journey started when he obtained a message from “a Russian man” on LinkedIn about six months in the past.
Software program engineer contacted on LinkedIn concerning paper from 2000
The Russian had learn a paper authored by Keep in 2000 describing a method that he had used to efficiently assault zip information.
“He had learn that paper I’d written 19 years in the past and wished to know if the assault may work on a file with solely two information, Keep writes, including: “A fast evaluation mentioned not with out an infinite quantity of processing energy and some huge cash.”
“As a result of I solely had two information to work with, much more false positives would advance at every stage. There would find yourself being 273 potential keys to check, almost 10 sextillion. I estimated it might take a big GPU farm a 12 months to interrupt, with a price on the order of $100Ok. He astounded me by saying he may spend that a lot to get well the important thing.”
Zip file contained keys to $300,000 in BTC
The information contained the non-public keys to what had been roughly $12,500 in BTC when the Russian bought the cash throughout 2016. “Now they had been price upwards of $300Ok and he couldn’t keep in mind the password,” says Keep.
“Fortunately, he nonetheless had the unique laptop computer and knew precisely when the encryption came about. As a result of InfoZip seeds its entropy utilizing the timestamp, that promised to cut back the work enormously—”solely” 10 quintillion—and made it fairly possible, a matter of a few months on a medium GPU farm.”
We made a contract and I started working,” he provides.
After a number of months of testing, together with the invention of a bug in his GPU farm, Keep claims to have cracked the file and returned the non-public key to the Russian.