#programming_topic
Introduction
Recently I've read a quite old article while i surfing the internet for new things about "Cybersecurity", my domain as usual. In that article they were introducing a mechanism to "crack a bitcoin wallet".
So me myself i got this idea popped up in my mind, more legit idea of creating a quite similar software to that introduced in the article i talked about. The idea of my software was simple, get list of wallets from a certain period and pick from that list wallets with 0 transaction in the last 5 year or 10. Then the rest is quite easy...
These old wallets are usually forgotten or owners unfortunately have deceased, When successful attempts happen you can always look for owners, or thier relatives to In order to return thier belongings and offer your services.
I. How it works ?
The software is simple and can be illustrated in these following steps :
1. Locating Wallets :
Locating and finding and storing wallet addresses is easiest part in this software project:
- Choose a Cryptocurrency. ( BTC or ETH recommended )
- Use a blockchain provider to get list of wallet addresses
- Use same blockchain provider to check the history of these addresses in last 5 or 10 years based on the period you want.
- Filter these wallets based on balance, for example: keep wallet with more than 100$ only.
- When valid addresses are found, they should be stored in a different file.
2. Cracking the wallets :
The cracking process is the most complicated one, but based on the programming language you chose, you migbt find some shortcuts. For example Python has very large and useful packages/libraries that can help in such projects. Here we'll take BTC as an example.
- Identify which type of wallets you have: BIP32, BIP39, BIP38... etc
- Generate seed phrases wordlists ( basically 2048 words in bitcoin )
- The seed phrases wordlists can be generated from Bitcoin mnemonic wordlists such as: BIP39 wordlist, BIP32 wordlist... etc wordlists can be found online or on pypi libraries.
- Then create 3 categories of recovery phrases : 12, 18, 24.
- Start your software
II. Logic
Now after the software starts, what is its logic ? well, the software first get list of wallet addresses from certain period e.g (2009-2014). Then it checks for transaction of these wallets within that period. If no transaction identified, the wallets saved as a list. Then the software takes addresses from that list and check for balances one wallet by one. Save wallets based on preferred balance e.g keep wallets with balance more than 100$ worth of BTC (recommended higher than 100$ to save time and reduce complexity ) and get rid of lower balance wallets. Then generate wallets wordlists based on wallet type, then identify types of wallets, this makes each wallet correspond with its own type wordlist. Then create 3 different folders: 12, 18 and 24 in each folder start recovery phrase generating process and this will make thaosands of files, each file contains 12 or 18 or 24 words, to explain more: when you start the generating process this will create files in json or txt, for example it creates files contain recovery phrases that contain 12 words and these files will be stored in 12 folder. and same goes for 18 and 24. This process can take time, you can always set a limit. When everything's done, you can start your software, the fmain unction basically takes each wallet address and try a recovery phrase on it.
1. Other functionalities
You can add a limiter for number of wanted wallets. Less than 5 recommended.
Add balance limit. More than 100$ worth of BTC
Generate 100 recovery phrase for each attempt for each recovery phrase length 12, 18, 24.
Add a caching mechanism to avoid generating same recovery phrase.
Other caching mechanism should be added to the software main functionality to avoid starting over each time.
Background working.
III. Disclaimer
This article is for educational purposes, and let cryptocurrency users know the risks and preventing measures to avoid loss of thier saved cryptocurrency balances and also it this software if successfully made, it must be used with knowledge of wallet owner or thier relatives or successors.
I, myself not interested in such project because i have other priorities, but it is a good idea and I don't recommend it to anyone.
