SHA-256 Puzzle in Destiny Game (Xbox One, PS4)

[bitcoiner49er]

Greetings!!

There was a post today on reddit about a graphic found inside the video game, Destiny:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/3k7ele/spoiler_hidden_hash_puzzle_in_the_mine_area_of/

There is listed a SHA-256 hash and the hint above about there being a 3 word, 24 byte (character) passkey/salt.

I have my "old" AM Cube and wanted to know if there was a way to re-purpose it to "crack" this hash?

Anyone have a script or idea what I could implement to achieve this? My cube is sitting there with nothing to do...

[1715295787]

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[achow101]

Miners can't be repurposed to do anything except sha256d hash. It can't even do just the normal sha256, it must do two rounds of it.

It could possibly be repurposed to crack sha256d hashes, but there aren't many things (besides bitcoin) that use it.

[bitcoiner49er]

Miners can't be repurposed to do anything except sha256d hash. It can't even do just the normal sha256, it must do two rounds of it.

It could possibly be repurposed to crack sha256d hashes, but there aren't many things (besides bitcoin) that use it.

Well... like I said there is a SHA-256 hash with a hint just waiting to be cracked, so this would be perfect if I could get it humming along.

Can I force-feed it the hash and make it think it's a network block?

[achow101]

Miners can't be repurposed to do anything except sha256d hash. It can't even do just the normal sha256, it must do two rounds of it.

It could possibly be repurposed to crack sha256d hashes, but there aren't many things (besides bitcoin) that use it.

Well... like I said there is a SHA-256 hash with a hint just waiting to be cracked, so this would be perfect if I could get it humming along.

Can I force-feed it the hash and make it think it's a network block?

Sha256 is different from sha256d. It is physically hard coded into the circuits to only do sha256d, not sha256. The difference is that sha256d is two rounds of sha256. So, you can't crack a sha256 hash with a miner since it is not sha256d.

You could force feed the miner with the proper data, it doesn't need to think it is a network block. But, it will only output the sha256d hash of the data, not the sha256.

[bitcoiner49er]

Miners can't be repurposed to do anything except sha256d hash. It can't even do just the normal sha256, it must do two rounds of it.

It could possibly be repurposed to crack sha256d hashes, but there aren't many things (besides bitcoin) that use it.

Well... like I said there is a SHA-256 hash with a hint just waiting to be cracked, so this would be perfect if I could get it humming along.

Can I force-feed it the hash and make it think it's a network block?

Sha256 is different from sha256d. It is physically hard coded into the circuits to only do sha256d, not sha256. The difference is that sha256d is two rounds of sha256. So, you can't crack a sha256 hash with a miner since it is not sha256d.

You could force feed the miner with the proper data, it doesn't need to think it is a network block. But, it will only output the sha256d hash of the data, not the sha256.

Gotcha.

Paper weight status: Unchanged

[DannyHamilton]

Imagining for a moment that you even could get it to work...

Let's assume that the "passkey" is exclusively made up of alphanumerics? (no punctuation, and no non-printable characters).

There are 26 letters in the english alphabet in two different cases (upper and lower) for a total of 52 alphabetics.  Ad in another 10 numerics and you're looking at 62 possibilities for each of the 24 positions.

62²⁴ = 1.04 X 10⁴³

Let's say you can get 30 GHash/s out of your cube.

1.04 X 10⁴³ possibilities  /  3.0 X 10¹⁰ hash/sec = 7.43 X 10³² sec to try all possibilities.

That's about 23571733000000000000000000 years to get through all the possibilities. (about 2.4 X 10²⁵)

The age of the solar system is estimated to be only 4.6 X 10⁹ years, so that's more than 5000000000000000 times more than how long the solar system has existed.

To have even a 0.01% chance of success you'll need to run the cube for more than 2357173300000000000000 years.

[bitcoiner49er]

Imagining for a moment that you even could get it to work...

Let's assume that the "passkey" is exclusively made up of alphanumerics? (no punctuation, and no non-printable characters).

There are 26 letters in the english alphabet in two different cases (upper and lower) for a total of 52 alphabetics.  Ad in another 10 numerics and you're looking at 62 possibilities for each of the 24 positions.

62²⁴ = 1.04 X 10⁴³

Let's say you can get 30 GHash/s out of your cube.

1.04 X 10⁴³ possibilities  /  3.0 X 10¹⁰ hash/sec = 7.43 X 10³² sec to try all possibilities.

That's about 23571733000000000000000000 years to get through all the possibilities. (about 2.4 X 10²⁵)

The age of the solar system is estimated to be only 4.6 X 10⁹ years, so that's more than 5000000000000000 times more than how long the solar system has existed.

To have even a 0.01% chance of success you'll need to run the cube for more than 2357173300000000000000 years.

True, but the clue states 3 "words". This COULD mean any word, but the game is US built and has a Russian undertone (where this "puzzle" was found). So you could use dictionaries or rainbow tables to narrow down the combinations, correct? Plus your max word length would be 22 letters.

[DannyHamilton]

True, but the clue states 3 "words". This COULD mean any word, but the game is US built and has a Russian undertone (where this "puzzle" was found). So you could use dictionaries or rainbow tables to narrow down the combinations, correct? Plus your max word length would be 22 letters.

Ah, when you said you wanted to try to use a bitcoin miner, I assumed you were just looking to do a straight brute force: increment the value until you got there.

If you had custom designed hardware for your purpose (instead of a bitcoin miner), perhaps there'd be a possibility.  I'm not up to trying out the math on that right now.

Unfortunately, as you've already learned from the previous comments in this thread, bitcoin miners aren't going to work for this purpose.

Bitcoin miners start with a midstate (the hash is partly computed before it is even given to the hardware to work on) that is built from an 80 byte block header.

Then the miner tries the hashes for all it's available values for a single 4 byte field.  If none of them are successful, then a new midstate needs to be provided for a new 80 byte header.  The process just keeps repeating like that forever.

As you can probably see, there isn't a way to iterate through a dictionary if the miner just blasts through all available values for 4 specific bytes (the last 4 bytes in the 80 byte header) and then wants the mining software to compute the next midstate.

It would be faster to just use your CPU to run through all the dictionary possibilities.

[bitcoiner49er]

True, but the clue states 3 "words". This COULD mean any word, but the game is US built and has a Russian undertone (where this "puzzle" was found). So you could use dictionaries or rainbow tables to narrow down the combinations, correct? Plus your max word length would be 22 letters.

Ah, when you said you wanted to try to use a bitcoin miner, I assumed you were just looking to do a straight brute force: increment the value until you got there.

If you had custom designed hardware for your purpose (instead of a bitcoin miner), perhaps there'd be a possibility.  I'm not up to trying out the math on that right now.

Unfortunately, as you've already learned from the previous comments in this thread, bitcoin miners aren't going to work for this purpose.

Bitcoin miners start with a midstate (the hash is partly computed before it is even given to the hardware to work on) that is built from an 80 byte block header.

Then the miner tries the hashes for all it's available values for a single 4 byte field.  If none of them are successful, then a new midstate needs to be provided for a new 80 byte header.  The process just keeps repeating like that forever.

As you can probably see, there isn't a way to iterate through a dictionary if the miner just blasts through all available values for 4 specific bytes (the last 4 bytes in the 80 byte header) and then wants the mining software to compute the next midstate.

It would be faster to just use your CPU to run through all the dictionary possibilities.

Thanks. I figured as much, but didn't know the specifics.

[crairezx20]

this topic is just the like here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1177337.0

[GriffinHeart]

Some guys were trying to mine bitcoin by hand?
Below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r3wau/mining_bitcoin_by_hand/
You can apply whatever hash-cracking power method that they used to decode this ominous message, I honestly don't know the start of mining manually, but you might want to try whatever method these guys used before it became unprofitable to crack the hash.