this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
120 points (94.1% liked)
Technology
59756 readers
2800 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can plausibly brute force up to 4, maybe 5 words of a seed phrase. It takes longer than a normal password because every seed phrase is technically valid, so the only way to know if your brute force is successful is to generate thousands of addresses at each of the different derivation paths you may expect funds to exist at.
The same seed phrase is used for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, etc, but each currency uses the seed phrase to generate addresses in a slightly different standard. Additionally, each wallet uses a slightly different variation of that. Within each wallet is a notion of accounts, and within each account you could have dozens of addresses. You need to generate each of those addresses, and scan each cryptocurrencies blockchain to see if those addresses have ever been used.
Realistically one of three things happened: his seed phrase was written down and they found it, it was password protected or on a drive with weak AES encryption and they cracked THAT instead, or finally, he used a hardware wallet and they exploited a firmware vulnerability to lift the PIN and transfer out funds and/or read the seed from the device