What is Bitcoin Private Key brute-forcing?

[ideas500k.com]

1. What is it?
2. How does it work?
3. How likely is it that a full length of a private key can be brute-forced?

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[pixie85]

1. From what I know it's like guessing your key by entering multiple key kombination into a wallet and checking if some of them contain coins.
2. Someone employs a bot that generates keys 24 hours a day in hope of striking gold.
3. Very unlikely.

A private wallet key is simply a number between 1 and 2^256 and to brute force it all you need is to continue guessing until you hit the right number between 1 and 115 quattuorvigintillion.

That’s a hard number for the human brain to process, but to put it in perspective, it’s greater than the estimated number of atoms in the universe. At that scale, even the world’s fastest supercomputer – IBM’s Summit – if tasked with brute forcing Bitcoin would effectively take forever to break just one wallet, which would test the patience of even the most determined hacker.

https://news.bitcoin.com/how-hard-is-it-to-brute-force-a-bitcoin-private-key/

[o_e_l_e_o]

At that scale, even the world’s fastest supercomputer – IBM’s Summit – if tasked with brute forcing Bitcoin would effectively take forever to break just one wallet, which would test the patience of even the most determined hacker.

Even if every single person in the world possessed a trillion IBM Summits and tasked every single one of them to bruteforcing a private key, we would reach the heat death of the universe before they had even covered one trillionth of one percent of the possibilities.

Simply put, bruteforcing a private key from scratch without any additional information is impossible.

[hatshepsut93]

You only have to worry about brute force attacks if you decide to use a brainwallet - computers can easily generate random values that are impossible to guess, but humans easily screw it up - they usually don't create random values of sufficient length and they aren't random at all as they tend to have very strong biases.

https://news.bitcoin.com/how-hard-is-it-to-brute-force-a-bitcoin-private-key/

Please, don't generate traffic for Roger Ver's site.

[dimfrab]

hello,

only quantics computers can do this. but this is not possible now. These computers are only in research but in any years, we will probably see these computers work. The encryption of password will change to be sure. one of issue is the quantics password based on quantics algorythms.

If you have precision, I'm interest to know more about this.

[gentlemand]

OP, if someone is trying to offer you something that claims it can do that they're either trying to take your money and disappear or implant a virus in the download they give you.

If they could be brute forced this forum and Bitcoin itself would not exist.

You can get somewhere brute forcing old brain wallets which are private keys derived from phrases or passwords. Most people don't make them strong enough.

[Wexnident]

Literally what "brute-forcing" means. You friggin use will power and the power of love and hope and dreams and hope you break down a private key. Which is ofc, absolute bs since event he most modern computers are unable to perform that many calculations even if you ask for it in a matter of years or decades. As for its chances... Hmmm... You could put it on the same level as Earth experiencing a natural disaster that is capable of destroying the entirety of humanity? Or maybe a bit higher than that but the chances are close.

If Op wants to ever try brute-forcing keys, Make sure you have a retirement plan as well as a will for your descendants to continue since even your great great great grandchild might be forced to just work as a graveyard keeper than doing this.

[seoincorporation]

1. What is it?
2. How does it work?
3. How likely is it that a full length of a private key can be brute-forced?

It just doesn't work, not even quantum computers can break bitcoin by brute force.

You can generate random privatekeys, and a big number of then, but if you make millions or trillions of keys you will be far away from have all the keys.

[LorenoCoin]

Trying to force a private key today is simply impossible. Recently I was wondering how it would be if I could unlock a BTC wallet just with the fingerprint, in fact I made a thread about that in the Spanish topic, but I finally concluded that it would not be a good idea, would make it a vulnerable system. (thoughts of free day)

[pooya87]

there are two places that you will ever hear the term "private key brute forcing". first is scammers trying to fool you and second is for recovery of your own keys. the last one is only possible as long as you have a lot of information about "your own key" for example when you have an encrypted key and know 10 out of 12 characters of your password but have forgotten the rest. or if you had a paper wallet that was damaged and only 48 out of 52 characters were readable,... in these cases you have a small searching space that you go through to find the key.

[Debonaire217]

In order for me to explain this, i will correlate it to the experience we might already have such as a zip file with password. In this case, if you want to open that zip file and you didn't know what the password is, you can use the method called "Brute Forcing". Wherein, you will use a software that will try all the possible password based on the number of characters you set, and if the password matches, you could open the zip file. The same with bitcoin private key, the reason why it is too hard for us to brute force private keys is because of its number of characters, the possible combination of characters is too difficult to brute force as it takes too much time, plus, if the system uses strict security features, most of the time, they limit the password input to 5 times, then your account could be locked. But if not, you'll need a very fast computing system to conduct this procedure.

[joniboini]

3. How likely is it that a full length of a private key can be brute-forced?

'Generating' a private key is not 'that difficult', finding the one with a lot of money is. Not to mention the power you need to do that. Doing a $5 wrench attack gives you a better success ratio if you want to rob somebody else.

[adaseb]

In order for me to explain this, i will correlate it to the experience we might already have such as a zip file with password. In this case, if you want to open that zip file and you didn't know what the password is, you can use the method called "Brute Forcing". Wherein, you will use a software that will try all the possible password based on the number of characters you set, and if the password matches, you could open the zip file. The same with bitcoin private key, the reason why it is too hard for us to brute force private keys is because of its number of characters, the possible combination of characters is too difficult to brute force as it takes too much time, plus, if the system uses strict security features, most of the time, they limit the password input to 5 times, then your account could be locked. But if not, you'll need a very fast computing system to conduct this procedure.

These aren't quite the same. To brute force a password is dependant on how long the password is and what characters or symbols it uses. If the password is a word from the dictionary it would be near instant to brute for it. But if the password is some 20 characters, numbers, symbols long then it would take a very long time, if ever to find the password. There is no password limit really. This isn't some exchange.

Bitcoin Addresses are difficult to brute force because the private key is very long, and there was a thread in this section were someone started to brute force them from private key "0" and they only found addresses containing a balance because people purposely sent it there as a contest but a real random generated public key hasn't been found yet, at least with a balace or even with a past transaction.

So BTC addresses are very safe from brute force at the moment.

[magneto]

1. What is it?
2. How does it work?
3. How likely is it that a full length of a private key can be brute-forced?

There's a thread about bitcoin address collisions or something along the lines of that, which essentially tries to brute force people's private keys AFAIK. There's also a lot of controversy around these projects because of the fact that no one knows exactly whether or not they are legit, and the figures they provide are legitimate.

Assuming that the figures these bitcoin colliders provide are legitimate, the risk is still very, very low.

You would almost certainly be better off dedicating such huge amounts of computing power to mining BTC or other coins rather than trying to brute force a particular private key. It's much harder to do this than to brute force, say a bank password, because this is completely random.

[o_e_l_e_o]

There's a thread about bitcoin address collisions or something along the lines of that, which essentially tries to brute force people's private keys AFAIK. There's also a lot of controversy around these projects because of the fact that no one knows exactly whether or not they are legit, and the figures they provide are legitimate.

They are not legit.

Some of these threads are bruteforcing keys which are insecure for a number of reasons. Many of them are brainwallets, where someone takes a phrase, lyric, quote, sentence, or even just a dictionary word, and hashes it with SHA256 to create a key. Some of them are created with non-fully-random number generators, human generated "randomness", or other insecure methods. Some of these threads are fake, people "brute forcing" addresses they already know the private key, in an attempt to lure people in to download their software (which is loaded with malware), donate money to the cause, or some other such scam.

If I give you the address of a truly randomly generated private key, it is impossible to brute force it.

[pooya87]

~ Exactly, if bruteforcing a particular key was actually possible we would have seen the Genesis block reward coins being accessed and probably sold to the highest bidder to pretend they are Satoshi through a signature.

no it wouldn't because the internet would collapse before you could even begin to sell those coins. you see all these exchanges, banks and websites are using similar cryptography schemes. for example the bitcointalk's SSL is using the same 256 bit ECC on curve P256 (that is secp256r1) using SHA256 as its hash function. same as Google.com!