[Cryptography] Another Bitcoin issue (maybe) (was: BitCoin bug reported)

Christian Huitema huitema at huitema.net
Sun Feb 16 00:57:46 EST 2014


>  So how do Bitcoin-mining ASICs affect general security?  Passwords and
 > encryption keys are often protected using the same hash algorithms that
the
 > mining ASICs (and FPGAs and GPUs) are designed to calculate at great
speed.
 > By repurposing the hardware that was designed for Bitcoin mining it would
be
 > possible to attack hashed passwords with an efficiency that wasnb

I am not sure I got the whole sentence, but should we not already assume
that "hashed passwords" can be attacked quite successfully using current
hardware, such as GPUs, maybe multiplied in a botnet. My working assumption
is that "if a human can remember the password, a computer can retrieve it
from the hash!" Not sure that we need mining hardware for that...

-- Christian Huitema





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