How a Presale Ethereum Wallet Containing 1000 ETH Was Recovered by KeychainX
An Ethereum enthusiast contacted KeychainX a few months ago with a unique story.
He was a part of the Ethereum pre-sale in 2014 and amassed a fantastic 1000ETH today worth about 4 million USD for a mere 300USD – an astonishing 13000x increase in value.
The story began when Alex sent the KeychainX team a question about whether if the team dealt with damaged wallets. Alex suspected the wallet to be corrupt or the encryption to be wrong, as he had the password saved in Splash ID together with other passwords and used to copy-paste it into the pre-sale webpage to join in the Ethereum token sale.
He was worried that using multiple systems like iPad, mac and phone and various language setups (Alex was half French), there might be some hiccup or language character decryption errors.
Since the password was pretty long (99 characters) and contained several special or non-ASCII characters, it was a devious task. However, inserting a random character at an arbitrary position is doable for shorter passwords. For an almost 100-character-long password, it was impossible.
But Alex was pretty sure of the password, so KeychainX “just” had to look up what was wrong. Of course, the password was also sexual, so writing the various password deviations using sexually explicit language was hilarious.
How a Presale Ethereum Wallet Containing 1000 ETH Was Recovered by KeychainXAlthough the words did not use S/M code words like one of KeychainX’s Hong Kong clients, they contained the words p*ssy and c*ck. Little did the team know how close to the problem and far away it was.
Being stubborn, the KeychainX team started by adding random characters at the positions the team suspected were those with possible problems. For example, sometimes, if a character were non-English, the code would translate it to a double character, which ultimately would cause the search space to increase dramatically. So doing that produced no result.
So the team went back to look at the Splash ID source code and tried to reverse engineer it to reproduce the problem. There were many versions of Splash ID, and their page did not offer it to be open source. No luck.
Then a few weeks later, a client contacted KeychainX with a completely different wallet using Cyrillic characters. Most of KeychainX’s custom-written tools were written for English passwords, so the team had to look into an old tool’s source code and look how to translate those to fit into the system. Read More...
