Bitcoin brain wallets allow investors the chance to store passphrases that are responsible for protecting Bitcoins in their brains. These wallets, while at first glance may seem competent, have been cracked several times.
This activity is usually done by Bitcoin brain wallet crackers—applications that are built by hackers to randomly guess billions of random passphrases within a second, if not more.
This is justified by the fact that a significant flaw in the Bitcoin brain wallet is that some of these passphrases are quite simple to decode. If you want to know how to create your own brain wallet, you can check this post.
Key Takeaways
• Bitcoin brain wallet crackers are capable of compromising passphrases set by particular investors which can lead to their assets getting stolen.
• If you know that you don’t have a good memory, it is best to stay away from brain wallets because there is a high chance that you might end up creating a predictable passphrase which can put your crypto assets at risk.
• Brainflayer is one efficient Bitcoin brain wallet cracker with new and improved features that is capable of exposing predictable passphrases set by investors to protect their assets.
• If you must use a Bitcoin brain wallet, you should make use of WarpWallet, but remember to use it with a salt phrase and a diceware password with at least eight words.
SEE ALSO: How to Create Your Own Brain Wallet
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Having said that, there are several Bitcoin brain wallet crackers in the crypto space today, but in this article, we will be taking a look at the three best Bitcoin brain wallet crackers known to have cracked Bitcoin brain wallets at some point in the past.
Here they are below:
1. Brainflayer
Brainflayer is considered to be the best Bitcoin brain wallet cracker right now, and for good reason. To begin with, brainflayer is a proof-of-concept brain wallet cracking tool that utilizes libsecp256k1 for pubkey generation.
This tool was founded by Ryan Castellucci, who made a statement at DEF CON back in 2015 that brain wallets weren’t a safe way to store Bitcoins and advised investors to move to more secure storage options.
According to him, human beings do not have the mental fortitude to create highly complex passphrases that are difficult to decode.
For this reason, all it takes is a highly motivated hacker to decipher the passphrase by testing severally generated passphrases across multiple Bitcoin addresses on the blockchain until it clicks and all of their Bitcoin assets are gone.
The term “brainflayer” was derived from the word “mind flayers”—a race of monsters from the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. They eat brains, psionically enslave people and look like Lovecraftian horrors.
One thing to note about the brainflayer is that it was built with the Unix philosophy in mind, and its main purpose is to search for brain wallets to compromise. However, it does not support the generation of user passphrases.
Today, Brainflayer has been massively upgraded from its DEFCON release, with new features having been added. To use this tool, simply
Precompute the bloom filter:
hex2blf example.hex example.blf
Run Brainflayer against it:
brainflayer -v -b example.blf -i phraselist.txt
OR
your_generator | brainflayer -v -b example.blf
Note that this tool is only built for the Linux operating system. Other operating systems would have to require extensive refactoring of Brainflayer’s memory optimizations, which would not be possible.
2. BW Tool
BW Tool is another top-notch Bitcoin brain wallet cracker suitable for cracking Bitcoin brain wallets and other low-entropy key algorithms. With this Bitcoin brain wallet cracker, you can search for keys in a key range as well as decimal and hex numbers.
Using this tool is quite easy since all you have to do is load a txt file with passwords, load a txt file containing new line-separated Bitcoin addresses, and you can mine instantly.
Other things to note about this tool are as follows:
- You can choose your separator instead of a newline.
- Sha256 hashing can be repeated on strings.
- Lookup is possible on compressed and uncompressed addresses as well. You can brute force current passwords from the costume char pool and costume length. Just check the using random chars checkbox and click start mining.
- If the current user-selected chars textbox is empty a predefined char array will be used.
Key range search:
Use a hex or decimal number at the start of the textbox and a bigger number in the “until textbox” if you want to search incrementally.
If you are using a hex number you should check the using hexadecimal checkbox first. If you placed a number in any textbox it will be converted if you change the hexadecimal checkbox.
Finally, just load an address list and hit the start mining button.
3. All Private Keys
All Private Keys is a multipurpose platform that provides a wide variety of tools, of which the Bitcoin brain wallet cracker is one of them.
On the homepage, you can search for compromised addresses (this is a section that has the Bitcoin brain wallet cracker), attack vectors, tools, and much more.
Once you click on the compromised address section, you will see the Bitcoin brain wallet cracker, which upon contact allows you to choose the number of words used in a brain wallet passphrase.
You will also see a list of dictionaries such as Electrum English, Linux, Electrum Portuguese, Electrum Chinese, Electrum Spanish, Electrum Japanese, etc.
Once you select the appropriate ones you want, you then click on generate, and a list of brain wallet paraphrases will be generated, which you can then copy and try out.
Finally, on this platform, you can also find other details such as Bitcoin addresses with balance, leaked Bitcoin keys, hacked brain wallets with balance, etc.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Can I Use Brainflayer to steal Bitcoin assets?
The purpose of brainflayer, according to the founder, was not to encourage theft but rather to serve as evidence that the Bitcoin brain wallet had massive flaws that were largely overlooked by developers and investors alike.
It is not advisable to steal people’s crypto assets as this is illegal, and if you are caught, you could end up facing serious consequences.
How are Bitcoin Brain Wallet Crackers Made?
Bitcoin brain wallet crackers are made by genius developers who are capable of noticing the flaws inherent in the coding process and design of the Bitcoin brain wallet.
They then proceed to set up tools/crackers to exploit these flaws, stealing a lot of crypto assets in the process.
Final Thoughts
The existence of Bitcoin brain wallet crackers has proven, if anything, that Bitcoin brain wallets are not the best storage options to use for storing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
It is best to use much more competent options such as hardware wallets for safely storing your Bitcoin assets.
However, if you are determined to use the brain wallet, you can go for WarpWallet, but remember to use it with a salt phrase and a diceware password with at least eight words, and you should be good to go.
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