Bitaddress.org BIP0038 - problems decoding

[vermillionCucumber]

Good day.  I've been involved in Bitcoin for a while now.  Am using a throwaway to avoid embarrassment.

Last year, I moved my cold storage coins to paper wallets made by Bitaddress.org.  Used a laptop with Linux Mint 17 boot key and the offline version from Github.

I tried to recover a couple of coins from a wallet in order to pay some medical bills (only valid reason right now) and can't get these things unlocked.  The balance is still in the address but I keep getting told I have an invalid passphrase for this encrypted wallet.

My main wallets have longer passphrases with special characters, but I've just tried a smaller one that had a simple password, and I can't unlock these either.

Unlike wallet.dat which has btcrecover (an excellent tool), I can't find any good BIP0038 cracking tools - the GoCoin dependent efforts I'm using are leaving me chasing dependency circles and everything else I saw is too primitive.

Any suggestions?  I'm too poor right now to offer a significant reward, but can offer a few dollars if anyone makes it work.

Could the boot ISO have defaulted to an older character set or something weird like that?

[1713499257]

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[deepceleron]

BIP0038 is made very computationally difficult to encrypt/decrypt. It was specifically designed to be resistant to hardware-accelerated brute force attacks. That will not be a fruitful attack method unless you simply need to figure out which of 20 passwords was used.

Were you able to decrypt the wallets previously? Were the specific passwords trialed before use?

You might try time-traveling - get a old version of the github bitaddress code from the date of creation to replicate any code flaws and load it back up on the original distro and platform used to make the addresses.

[vermillionCucumber]

Thank you very much for the response.  I was panicking and probably posted in the wrong forum.

I've used btcrecover before and found it excellent for taking a list of password fragments including positional information and trying them.  It also has good support for spelling errors and a resume file etc.

While I understand that BIP0038 is resistant to such, one decryption attempt takes approx 10 seconds on the hardware I could dedicate. A couple of million variations could be attempted in less than a year.

Given that John the Ripper doesn't support BIP0038, I guess it's time to fire up crunch, learn some Go, and set up some a scripts as best I can.  Unless anyone has any better suggestions.

Thanks, everyone.

EDIT:  Thanks for the time-travelling idea.  I used the same old hardware and software versions, and everything worked as expected, so no luck there.

[Shawshank]

Are you using the same version of bitaddress that you used to create the BIP38 private keys? Maybe you can try an older version of bitaddress here:
https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org

Go to Branch:master, select the Tags tab, choose the correct version and download it to your computer. Current version is 3.3.0.

[U2]

The only thing I would know about is when we're talking about characters that look alike (assuming you wrote down the password) try replacing small "l" and capital "l" O and 0 etc. Other than that, check your keyboard layout and make sure it's correct. Sometimes on live versions I know you could have a UK version rather than US etc. Try looking at a keyboard map to double check.