Is Bitcoin's security impenetrable? This group used 30 trillion keys to crack 30 wallets

For the past eight months, a group of crypto enthusiasts has been engaged in a quixotic effort: brute-forcing the encryption algorithm used to create Bitcoin wallet addresses.

Since the advent of Bitcoin, its security has become a consensus among many people, so the current idea of ​​this organization is also considered unrealistic. Its name, Large Bitcoin Collider (LBC), which is similar to the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, may also imply this meaning.

However, if LBC succeeds, it would immediately render a key part of Bitcoin’s encryption algorithm ineffective.

principle

A Bitcoin wallet randomly generates a public address and an associated private key. The randomly generated public address must be "random" enough to ensure that the associated private key cannot be guessed.

Technically, a bunch of private keys can be matched to any public address, but if you want to brute force a matching address and key, it would require enormous computer resources to traverse countless possibilities.

This is obviously impossible for any single team to achieve, so LBC hopes to realize this idea by combining the computer resources of all users through a software it has developed.

Legal issues

LBC actually means taking bitcoins from other people's bitcoin wallets through hacking. The organization's founder, who goes by the pseudonym Rico, told vice.com that if users obtain bitcoins through LBC's network, they can basically keep them for themselves. As for whether this is legal, LBC recommends users to take a calm attitude.

LBC states on its website:

Depending on how you look at it, this could be considered theft and therefore illegal.

However, there are many other arguments that allow you to own 5-10% of the value of what you find, perfectly legally. So think of it this way: do you want to own 100% and become a criminal, or just 10% and remain a law-abiding citizen?

LBC has been online for less than a year, and Rico said that the project has generated 30 trillion keys and compared them with existing Bitcoin wallet addresses. A total of 30 matching keys have been screened out, but some of them may be "phishing" keys specifically for crackers, and there are already three matching keys that actually contain Bitcoin.

Mixed reviews in the industry

On the surface, trying to crack someone else's Bitcoin wallet is obviously a malicious act. However, LBC's work also has research value .

Ryan Castellucci, a Bitcoin security researcher, once cracked a Bitcoin wallet to simulate the behavior of an attacker in order to deploy countermeasures. Regarding the LBC project, he said:

One thing that disappointed me was that they only compared addresses that had balances, not all addresses that had ever been used.

From a research perspective, this is more interesting than looking at all addresses ever used, as it will be able to show if there are any weak addresses generated in the past, and if they have been cleaned up by attackers.

However, cracking Bitcoin wallets is only one of LBC's goals. Another goal is to use a collision attack to allow users to input data and then process it through the Bitcoin address hash algorithm to directly generate matching keys and addresses. If this goal is achieved, then a completely new algorithm must be used to generate Bitcoin addresses.

This is similar to what happened in February this year when Google cracked SHA-1, a major algorithm in web encryption, and achieved the world's first SHA-1 collision attack. The once widely used SHA-1 algorithm was thus declared doomed.

P2PKH is one of the encryption algorithms used to generate Bitcoin addresses, and Rico explained that if a collision could be achieved, it would mean the end of this encryption algorithm, not Bitcoin itself . He said:

Bitcoin will continue to evolve with new address types, so it is fairly certain that it will not “die”.

Rico said that since its establishment eight months ago, the LBC project has received many labels: impossible, illegal, meaningless, and cool, etc. He said that there are still many things waiting for LBC to discover, including achieving collisions, so he does not care about the outside world's views.