[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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