LOL, I got 100% nerd-sniped by my friend Sönke this week and wound up building a small spaceship.
On Monday he's like "Hey, what if you found obscure seed phrases embedded in public texts? You'd only need to remember the name of the book and the paragraph and go from there."
I honestly could care less about crypto(currencies) and I'm 100% sure this is like cryptanalysis 101. But, yeah, it seemed like an interesting problem anyways.
First, I downloaded a few hundred books from Gutenberg, wrote a ruby script and found BIP39 word sequences with a tolerable buffer for filler-words.
Then, I was like, okay, gotta now check them against actual addresses. Downloaded a list of funded ETH addresses. Wrote the checker in ruby. Ran it. No hits but this was now definitely weirdly interesting.
Because: And what if I downloaded the whole pg19 text corpus to scan! And what if I'd add BTC addresses! And what if I checked every permutation of the seed phrase!
Everything got really slow once I got to processing 12G of raw text for finding sequences and then checking a few million candidates with 44.000+ variations per candidate.
So, let's rewrite this into C! And since I've got 16 cores, let's parallelize this puppy! And since it's a MacBook, let's use GCD! Optimize all the things!
Lol, so NOW this thing is so fucking FAST. Takes four minutes to go through the full pg19 corpus and generates 64,205,390 "interesting" seed phrases. The fully parallelized checker (see Terminal screenshot) processes 460 derived addresses per second.
I really don't care if I get a match or not. I feel like I started with building a canoo and wound up with a spaceship is in itself just the best thing in the world.
For reference, here are the two heavy-lifting workers:
- https://github.com/akaalias/bipscan/blob/main/src/c/find_seq...
- https://github.com/akaalias/bipscan/blob/main/src/c/check_se...
and here's a screenshot of the thing running:
- https://x.com/SpringStreetNYC/status/1996951130526425449/pho...
and here's the full story:
LOL, I got 100% nerd-sniped by my friend Sönke this week and wound up building a small spaceship.
On Monday he's like "Hey, what if you found obscure seed phrases embedded in public texts? You'd only need to remember the name of the book and the paragraph and go from there."
I honestly could care less about crypto(currencies) and I'm 100% sure this is like cryptanalysis 101. But, yeah, it seemed like an interesting problem anyways.
First, I downloaded a few hundred books from Gutenberg, wrote a ruby script and found BIP39 word sequences with a tolerable buffer for filler-words.
Then, I was like, okay, gotta now check them against actual addresses. Downloaded a list of funded ETH addresses. Wrote the checker in ruby. Ran it. No hits but this was now definitely weirdly interesting.
Because: And what if I downloaded the whole pg19 text corpus to scan! And what if I'd add BTC addresses! And what if I checked every permutation of the seed phrase!
Everything got really slow once I got to processing 12G of raw text for finding sequences and then checking a few million candidates with 44.000+ variations per candidate.
So, let's rewrite this into C! And since I've got 16 cores, let's parallelize this puppy! And since it's a MacBook, let's use GCD! Optimize all the things!
Lol, so NOW this thing is so fucking FAST. Takes four minutes to go through the full pg19 corpus and generates 64,205,390 "interesting" seed phrases. The fully parallelized checker (see Terminal screenshot) processes 460 derived addresses per second.
I really don't care if I get a match or not. I feel like I started with building a canoo and wound up with a spaceship is in itself just the best thing in the world.