Topic: New blog post: Hiding Bitcoins in Your Brain (Read 7278 times)

https://bitbucket.org/mmanchaild/brainqeyz/src

Maybe, we have test.go there )
Bitbucket iface is somewhat confusing.

Play with care !

> How about...
Then you will depend on that photo/video file(s)
quality/validity etc.
So this will not be any different from
holding of
 standard wallet backup.

>>>My thought behind brainwallets were so that they could not be lost or destroyed?
Yes,this is a main reason.

My "brainkeyz" is not so "special".
In fact almost everyone (well, every coder) can memorize
this( or similar to this) algo directly in his/her
 brain( thanks to expressiveness of Go ).

The best part of the story :
there is NO average user.
Even after disclosure of the source code,
99,99%% of potential users will
be scared enough and won't use this stuff.

@ErebusBat
It was an ETA for my PC for one try of
P & S combination.
On your box the time needed could be different.

Look at the source code.
Application simply discards first 300 found keys.First key "in the money" will be
301st key.

So that "anti brute-force time barrier"
is the sum of : the time for calculating
 scrypt pre-key and the time for calculating
 all those 300 keys, that will be discarded.

one can adjust this "time barrier" simply
 by changing the count of discarded keys
 to bigger number.It will give him more safety.

@casascius
Yes, it can be tuned to 900-minute or even
1-week mode of operation.

This is just simple utility for people,
who know , what they are doing, and NOT
 for newbies.
Even passphrases provided with the source
 code should prevent newbie from playing
 with "brainqeyz"

This is a usual trade-off between time and security.

Also note, that only generating keys(several times for safety) will take a long time.
But then you will simply have a bunch of keys,
which can be imported as always into any *coin
 client capable for key import.
One can store "ready for use" keys in the truecrypt container.

404, do you have a working link of the souce code?

How about a SHA256 hash of a picture or video from your own camera? The photo or video is of the sky, or of the ground, or something weird; something no one else is going to take a picture of; in the dark, with highest ISO speed for grainiest photo. Or a bunch of photos. Of course, add salt and iterate a few hundred times.

I am not sure I see the point in this vs truly random keys?

My thought behind brainwallets were so that they could not be lost or destroyed?  The idea behind just using a simple SHA256 was that it was not complicated or hard, you can even find (non bitcoin) related sites to do it for you.

If you require a special program to generate your address then does that leave the realm of brainwallet and enter the realm of super-duper wallet generator?

Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea, but it would be very hard for me to loose anything digital.  But for your average user I am not so sure?

A brainwallet generator that has an option that can be cranked up to 90+ minutes might be useful.  But one that requires people to wait 90 minutes to do their first brainwallet, is one that probably hasn't been properly thought through.

A 90-minute or 900-minute brainwallet has useful properties from the perspective of robbery/duress prevention.  Teaching someone that a brainwallet is something that requires at least 90 minutes to access, on the other hand, is going to sound ridiculous.

I am interested in how you calculated that every brute force attempt would take 2.5 hours.

OR.. OR....  use a random wallet and store the private key / recovery code in LastPass or keepass.

I understand the 'attractiveness' of brainwallets is that your computer could go away and you can still get your bitcoins back.

HOWEVER usb drives / paper wallets / safe deposit boxes / mom's houses are very effective and cheap. 

This reminds me of a conversation we had at work.  We currently backup on-site and ti our data center, which happens to be about two blocks away from us.  We had the opportunity to add another city to that list.  Whilst discussing it I brought up the good question "if our building is destroyed AND the datacenter is destroyed will we still be in business?"

if you PGP encrypt your wallet and give your mom a copy and put a copy in your safe deposit box and all those are destroyed then most likely your primary concern is going to be running from zombies and not where your magic internet money went.

Just Sayin.

It would be unfortunate to make brainwallets inconvenient to generate because they won't hold coins securely for decades when some people may desperately need them for just a few hours or days during periods of travel or social unrest...

It should block until it has enough data.

That hexdump format drops leading zeros, so you don't always get the same length output.  Use %08x instead:


Also note that /dev/random won't always have 32 bytes of random data available, so you might get a much shorter output.

Well, in addition to all the critiques on that thread, it seems rather cumbersome and unwieldy.  And I think it's unlikely to be widely adopted.  Also, I would be nervous that maybe my subconscious wouldn't meet expectations when I need it to the most.

There was a discussion of this on HN a few months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4266115

As long as the code used is obscure, it might be OK, but the need to have access to the book makes it unsuitable for some scenarios (e.g. you're on the run and have to quickly access your stash, you don't have the book w. you, and there's no time to visit the library).

How secure is this type of brainwallet?
1. Memorize a short phrase like a song lyric or quotation.
2. Make an algorithm that converts the letters to numbers.
3. Use those numbers to find words in a book making sure of the exact edition.
4. Use those words as the actual brainwallet passphrase.

Here is another idea: split your funds across 10 or 20 brainwallets whose passphrases don't easily lead to one another.

Admittedly though, this is far easier said than done.

I have long thought that being able to have 10 or 20 distinct brainwallets would be a killer application for Bitcoin.  The catch is that each of those brainwallets must not be clues as to how to hack the other ones, otherwise someone will do it.

The prototypical application for such a thing would be an activist in prison, or someone stuck in another country and robbed of everything but their underwear.  The prisoner would want the ability to have a brainwallet so that he could reliably secure legal counsel and pay bills, but without being stuck with the choice of giving access to nothing or everything.  He could use brainwallet #1 for his retainer (if in prison) and release the remaining ones to pay bills as they came due.  The robbery victim could call somebody back home and ask for fiat via Western Union (assuming no way to sell BTC locally), without the risk that the person could rip them off for more than 10% of their brain money (and have it 1/10 the temptation at the same time).

Of course, the problem is that it's bad enough just learning a single passphrase with sufficient entropy, let alone a dozen.  For someone really interested in it, they'd probably have to learn some sort of algorithm that they could sort out in their head or with nothing more than a pencil and paper, so they could derive their own private keys by hand.  (In this case, it's safe to assume they've got relatively unlimited time on their hands)

For example if one memorized the SHA256 algorithm and could compute a SHA256 hash on paper with unlimited time, he could remember "n bottles of beer on the wall in my grandmother's basement at 20205 poppy lane in Witchita" where n was a number he could increment.  He could hand-hash in his prison cell without divulging his passphrase (assuming he had a way to not get his notes confiscated).

Sure, but I'm just saying that, if you do use sentinel wallets, their passphrases should most certainly NOT be a substring of any longer passphrases for your other brainwallets; that is just asking for trouble.  They could be shorter passphrases designed in a similar way, however, to still give you some idea about the security (or lack thereof) of your other brainwallets.

Okey dokey, first I think nobody should use an easy-to-memorize brainwallet for anything more than experimenting. I predict we'll start seeing very unhappy brainwallet users reporting huge losses sooner or later.

Second: the 'sentinel wallet' idea is all about incentives.

You need to put enough BTC in the sentinel wallet so it is economically rational for an attacker to "take the money and run" rather than spend time and money trying to crack a bigger brainwallet that might not even exist.

Again, I don't think you should use a brainwallet, so I'm not motivated to do the math to figure out how many BTC you should put into the sentinel wallet so a ration attacker will just take it, but that is the way you should think about it.