Brute force seeds

[Blyat]

Hello people. I love this initative im a noob also and I have some concerns.

Cant we bruteforce the &*%$ out of all possible seeds and transfer IOTA contained via the seeds to a malicious user holding IOTA adress?

Greetings
Blyat C

[apparobotnik]

Go on, do it. But don't forget to use seeds 81Chars long containing uppercase A-Z and 9 in random order or sooner than later you will take away your own IOTAs

[studentchr]

Im curious about this too. Bruteforce protection is provided in bitcoin through game theory where it is more profitable to mine honestly than bruteforce addresses so I am very curious how this attack vector is addressed in IOTA.

[Blyat]

So you say its chanceless to try do it? Because you dont have enough chance you actually hit the 'jackpot'?

[Chewyone]

You can just do basic maths to prove it's beyond impractical.

For example,

27^81 is equivalent to 8.72^115 combinations. Assuming lets say, 1 billion wallets used, that is 1*10^9 wallets.

As a ratio 1*10^9/8.72^115 gives an odds of about 1/8.72^106 of finding a wallet.

Let's bump the wallet count up to 100 trillion, the odds are still 1/8.72^101 which is still beyond the realms of comprehension. Your seed will only get hacked from a keylogger, which is what would happen with any other kind of encryption. An 81 character seed is beyond safe.

[Blyat]

Guess that makes sense!

[zxx5]

But why not 1-8, Lower cases letters and symbols ?

[Joshua]

Also let it be known that there are "only" about 10 to the power of 83 atoms in the known universe.
In layman’s terms, that works out to be one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms

So you would need the power of many many sun's at perfect efficiency to even power a computer large enough to bruteforce a seed.

[superresistant]

It's the same as the addresses. Only caps letters and 9.

[phx]

But why not 1-8, Lower cases letters and symbols ?

This has to do with how the underlying crypto functionality works. IOTA uses balanced ternary instead of binary; each unit is called a "trit" (instead of bit) and can have value 0, 1 or -1. 3 trits form a "tryte", and there are 27 possible values for a tryte to have. As a form of shorthand, each of these 27 possible values is assigned an ASCII representation:

iotaledger/iota.lib.py/blob/04e1cb5/test/types_test.py#L575-L603

In other words, your seed isn't 81 characters; it's 81 trytes. The ASCII characters are just an abstraction.

For more info about balanced ternary, see:

The Balanced Ternary Machines of Soviet Russia

[cr4zys4m]

In addition to other responses it would also use a tremendous amount of space to create a wordlist for all possible outcomes. After running through crunch -

kali:~# crunch 81 81 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ9
Crunch will now generate the following amount of data: 10728580411319913766 bytes
10231571589775 MB
9991769130 GB
9757587 TB
9528 PB
Crunch will now generate the following number of lines: 13403493667807115355

Plus take into account the slight amount of time for all the seed/passwords to be entered into the wallet and load just to see if any funds are in there then logout to test another. Just not possible... Even if you managed to auto enter the keys as they're generated rather than saving the wordlist you would still have the delay from opening that wallet then logging out. I'd imagine someone could automate it. Even then I would imagine your GPU or CPU would burn out and your electricity bill through the roof before you EVER struck one with any funds... (or any worth while...)