
Create bitcoin wallet algorithm - similar
Hackaday
Actually, brute force IS the way to do it. You have to guess a randomized input message, run the hashing algorithm on it, then see if the hash (also called a “digest”) matches the known one. You do this for every combination and length of chararacters for a message until you stumble onto the right one.
Let’s say you give me a hash of your message. I can try to guess what message you hashed. So I’m going to guess that maybe you could be the Zodiak killer trying to confess. So I’m going to run a hash on, “I, piegunman, am the Zodiak killer.” The resulting hash does not match yours. So now I know one thing your message did NOT say. Maybe you said your boss sucks? I run the algorithm on, “My boss sucks.” The hash doesn’t match. But maybe if your boss’ name was Bob, you could have used “Bob” instead of “My boss.” So I will hash “Bob sucks.” Well, the resulting hash for that didn’t match, either. But at least I have verified three messages are NOT what you said.
Hashing is “one way only” because the digesting process performs repeated math functions that “round off” or “truncate” the results after each function by chopping off the remainders. It’s like if I say “9 divided by 2 equals 4” because while technically, the answer would have been “4.5”, I am programmed to round down my answers to whole numbers, which in this case is a 4. If you tried to reverse engineer my answer “4” by MULTIPLYING by 2 (which is the reverse of divide by 2),you would say “4 times 2 equals 8”. But 8 is incorrect… the message was 9, remember? To complicate this, my rounded off number is put through the ringer over and over, each time truncating the result, losing more data each time, mutating it further.
The concept here is that if you know a message, and you run the same hashing algorithm that I did on it, you should end up replicating the exact same mutations that I did, and get the identical result, thus verifying the hash and the message are intrinsically linked.
This is a one-way function because no one know how much of a remainder was chopped off in each stage of the hash calculation in order to put it back. If I cut my ears off, and then I tell you to surgically create new ears IDENTICAL to what I used to have, how can you know what my ears used to look like when both of them are gone?
Can you “unbake” a cake? If I give you flour, eggs, water, etc and you mix them together and bake them into a cake, what if I change my mind and want MY eggs (not some OTHER eggs) back? Can you extract the flour out of the cake? Can you pull the eggs out of the cake and put them back into the shells?
And what about the “digest” analogy of SHA? If I eat a slice of pizza and “digest” it into poop, can you “un-digest” that poop and turn it back into a slice of pizza? The only way to know for sure what food I ate is for you to eat every food in existence and then poop each one out yourself and then compare your poop to my poop until you find matching poops, thus revealing which food I ate. And no, SHA256 doesn’t leave clues behind like undigested corn.
Brute force is the way. You just need billions of quantum computers and billions of years.
But all that aside, we have a bigger problem. If you manage to figure out how to reverse a hash back into a message, we all die. Yes, you heard me. World War 3.
You see, all encrypted data like your social security number, credit card info, bank account info, etc has been logged and is saved on several hard drives across the world. But we don’t worry because it’s all a jumbled up encrypted mess that is protected by an asymmetrical key pair which functions based on… you guessed it… SHA. If you or someone else break SHA, the least of our worries would be that every social security number, every bank account number, every bitcoin wallet, every password, and every credit card number IN EXISTENCE would instantly be publically know to all almost 8 billion people on earth all at once…
The bigger problem is that all encrypted messages sent over the past 60 years by world leaders (I’m looking at you, Trump), militaries, and spy organizations (like the CIA) will be instantly known to everyone… and I mean EVERYONE. Including OTHER world leaders who might not mind launching nukes at us in anger… and terrorist organizations who now know our top secret assassination plans for tomorrow. On the plus side, this works in reverse, and we also learn when and where their next secret attack will be. But now Trump also knows what name Putin calls him behind his back.
Did you know, in now declassified documents, while Cuba was threatening to launch nuclear missiles at the US, the CIA sent an operative to give Fidel Castro poisoned cigars? The spy got cold feet and bailed out of his mission, thus, Castro was not assassinated. But if this spy’s secret communications were readable by Castro, do you think he may have, at the time, been enraged by the attempt enough to launch missiles out of anger?
What would Rocketman in North Korea do if he knew all the things the president has discussed about him behind his back?
Yes, you crack SHA-256… enjoy my social security and credit cards and bitcoin while you can. World War 3 is coming.
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