Bitfi's hardware wallet is terrible

It recently came to my attention that John McAfee has been advertising a cryptocurrency hardware wallet from a company called Bitfi, with the claim that it is "unhackable". There's even a $250,000 bounty[1] to hack it. I do not have one of the actual devices in my possession, but from my review of the publicly available "source code" [PDF] and their private key calculator, my conclusion is that their product is most charitably described as a "footgun".

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Storybits: error resistant mnemonics

At DEFCON 22, Dan Kaminsky and I talked a little bit about something I built which he dubbed "Storybits[1]". Storybits can reversibly transform short strings of binary data into a series of words designed to produce a mental image. Order of the words does not matter, and many typos can be corrected automatically. I already had working code at the time of that talk, but since then it's just been sitting around on my computer. People have been asking about it, so I put it up on GitHub, though it's still a hacky prototype. I've thrown together a demo and written a bit about how it works.

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Forensic Bitcoin cracking: as easy as 1, 3, 7...

Since its release at DEFCON 23, I've done quite a bit of work on brainflayer. First, I added support for a few other brainwallet-like schemes and hex-encoded private keys. Then, in October, I integrated some code provided by Dr. Nicolas T. Courtois and Guangyan Song from UCL that sped up brainflayer by about 150%. With a subsequent optimization that yielded a further 65% speedup, it is now over four times faster than the initial release.

In January, I added specialized code for brute force private key search. While trying it out, I found something very interesting.

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Recreating Craig Wright's Sartre file

By the time I had a look into Craig Wright's blog post that seemed to imply that he is Satoshi, others had already pointed out that the signature was copied from a 2009 transaction. The contents of the "Sartre" file, however, were still a mystery. Dan Kaminsky had a blog post up analyzing the commands from CW's post, but hadn't been able to figure that bit out, so he asked me to have a look.

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HTTPS subresource validation fail

In the spring of 2014, I found a bug in several browsers, including Epiphany, Xombrero, Opera Mini and Midori. They were loading subresources, such as scripts, from HTTPS servers without doing proper certificate validation. I tracked this down to some bad defaults in webkit which have since been fixed.

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Why I'm releasing a brainwallet cracker at DEFCON 23

On August 7th I will be giving a talk at DEF CON about cracking brainwallets. As part of that talk, I will be releasing a fast[1] brainwallet cracker. I'm writing this post to provide a little insight as to why I'm giving away a tool that could be used to steal. I also hope that people who are currently using brainwallets will take notice and move to a more secure storage method.

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Using GitHub with multiple accounts or deploy keys

GitHub's implementation of git over ssh identifies accounts (for purposes of access control) solely by ssh public key. As a consequence, a particular public key can be associated with, at most, one account. Deploy keys are even more restricted - they can only be associated with a single repository. While ssh can try several keys, GitHub doesn't know what you're trying to access until after you authenticate, so a workaround is required to select the right key.

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Stupid certificate tricks

Sometimes I do things for no real reasons other than "because I can" and/or "it amuses me". For example, embedding a snarky message into my HTTPS certificate.

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Why Bitcoin mining ASICs won't crack your password

I've seen a lot of people expressing concern that Bitcoin mining ASICs are going to lead to some sort of password cracking apocalypse.

They won't.

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How I made my header image

I'm pretty happy with how my header image (seen above) turned out. Here's how it was made:

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Never forget to start screen again

There a few systems that I frequently work on from multiple locations. I like to be able to log back in and pick up where I left off after disconnecting and screen is great for that, but I have to remember to start it before I do anything else. After forgetting one too many times, I figured out how to start it automatically when I open an interactive SSH session. Here's what I came up with:

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