BTC Rescue lost – In its history, Bitcoin has made many happy, as well as a few unhappy. Yes, we are talking about people who have misplaced their private keys and therefore their BTC. Stefan Thomasthe former technical director of Ripple, knows the situation well. He misplaced the password of a USB key containing several thousand BTC.
Unciphered to the rescue of Ripple’s lost BTC
In 2011, Stefan Thomas, the former CTO of Ripple, filed no less than 7,002 BTC on an IronKey, a type of secure USB key, protected by a password. A colossal sum to date estimated at more than 220 million euros. The particularity of this hard drive is that it only allows ten attempts to enter the password before being locked irrevocably.
You saw it coming, Stefan Thomas forgot his password. So, he has been actively looking for a solution to access his funds for several years.
In 2021, this was already on its 8th attempt out of the 10 authorized. An increasingly tense situation, with millions of dollars at stake.
Faced with this delicate situation, Unciphered, a company specializing in the recovery of cryptocurrencies, decided to help Thomas. Thus, the company revealed its intentions in an open letter on its blog.
According to the company’s statements, they have developed a method to unlock the key and access the valuable BTC stored there.
“Then we reviewed everything we knew about your device, drawing on the expertise of some of the industry’s best hardware hackers, crypto mathematicians, and exploit developers, looking for any signs of weakness. Spoiler alert: we found one. »
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Unciphered’s innovative method
In his open lettere, Unciphered details the method they plan to use to help Stefan Thomas.
Indeed, one of the possible methods would have been the brute-force. Namely, try all password combinations. Except that the limit to 10 attempts narrows the range of possibilities.
So rather than simply trying to guess the password, the company uses a combination of techniques. She focused in particular on theanalysis of hardware and software vulnerabilities on IronKey keys.
The objective is to bypass password attempt limits by exploiting potential vulnerabilities in the hardware itself. This would allow you to try an almost unlimited number of combinations without risking permanently locking the disk.
“We firmly believe that every problem has a solution, and with the combination of our technical skills and determination, we are confident in our ability to help Mr. Thomas”
Excellent news for Stefan Thomas who could well get his hands on several hundred million dollars.
For its part, Bitcoin has seen renewed attention. So its price suddenly started to rise again. So much so that BTC is now flirting with $35,000.
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