It doesn't unless you chose something stupid like "correct horse battery staple" or "word + word + number". 7 words chosen from 1000 word dictionary password encrypted AES 256 cannot be cracked with existing technology, 8 words impossible with future tech.
That depends entirely on the hash function being used.
With a bad choice like SHA256, a 7 word passphrase could be cracked in as little as a few months with a single ASIC. The US government probably has a bunch of them already, so I think that an 8 word passphrase is already within reach for current tech.
Of course, with a real key derivation function like Argon2id, things would look much better.
Yeah, but at the end of the day these keys have to be used by human beings so the passwords were likely something practically sized and easy to use.
Especially since in general the likeliest failure mode would be the user forgetting the password to their millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin keys, followed by someone attacking the password.
This depends on the key derivation function used. PBKDF2 or BCrypt with strong enough difficulty factor makes even fairly short passwords difficult to crack. On the other hand, a straight SHA-256 hash method can be broken insanely quick with fairly long passwords.
I never really did the math before but I whacked something together real quick in Excel. At $0.30/THash BTC we can come up with some cost expectations for password lengths. Here I will use a 74 possible character password using 26 upper and lower case letters, 10 numbers and 12 symbols. Totally random of course. Using (Possible Chars ^ Password Length) as the number of combinations and guessing we will find our answer at about %50 of our guesses. (See! Super rough)
With SHA-256 it takes about $21 to crack a 6 character password.
$1500 to crack 7 characters.
$108,330 to crack 8 characters.
$7.8 million to crack 9 characters.
$561 million to crack 10 characters.
$40 billion to crack 11 characters.
$3 trillion to crack 12 characters.
$200 trillion to crack 13 characters.
Edit Note: BTC is kinda expensive per hash right now. Usually this would all be cheaper. Past 14 characters it could be 1 cent and still outrun the usual US budget for a couple years.
Random example but my passwords look something like chOf$Tyl83fhn@54R. I keep them written down because they are hard to remember. My threat model is no one. Seems so amateur to use a simple password that could be brute forced. Especially with so much on the line.
>Seems so amateur to use a simple password that could be brute forced. Especially with so much on the line.
There's selection bias going on because only dumb criminals get caught, so you only hear about the dumb opsec practices of those criminals. Conversely, you'll never hear about the opsec practices of that professional crew with perfect opsec that hacked an exchange/difi contract and disappeared into thin air.
Until the least bright member of the crew makes a mistake, gets caught, and turns in the rest. Being perfect is difficult to maintain forever, though it's possible in principle. It might require the thief to live like a grad student even though he has billions of dollars/euros worth of stolen wealth; being flashy attracts attention and if nothing else, the tax authorities.
If a person is that financially rich but still has to live like a grad student, it seems like the only point of that wealth is to rebel against the legal system. Even if one isn't caught, there's still a loss of freedom to avoid getting caught.
I haven't studied criminology, but I alternatively suppose someone who does that just doesn't think that far ahead. This likely also explains why the vast majority of people with these capabilities choose to live a life in accordance to their country's laws.
There's money laundering; have a front business and gradually mix in a bit of the illegal money and pretend it came from the business. That's how mobsters do it.
That's right; your comment brings to mind this scene where the character Saul Goodman explains money laundering in Breaking Bad (this clip is supposedly shown as part of university lectures): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhsUHDJ0BFM
Or, the TLA involved have some sort of crack or acceleration procedure; the TLA say "the criminals were dumb" because the people involved can't combat that without admitting guilt, and who'd believe them. The real reason is the TLA used illegal access and tools that we wouldn't be happy they're using against the civilian population? Oh, and the people using the tools are guilty by association so they're inhibited from whistleblowing.
Or the one that stole $3.9B worth, went to great lengths to put $3.6B where it could get tracked down, but linked to somebody else. Then they took $200M and made it even harder to track down, but linked to somebody else. Then they kept $100M with insane opsec knowing that the incentive to recover it had been reduced by 90+%.
