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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but I am currently trying to recover ~$70000 worth of ether[1] from my presale wallet and the encryption used is indeed SHA-3.

I'm currently trying 21970881 passwords against the hash using fairly basic python code (ETA: 2-3 days), and can definitely use tips for speeding up the work, as Id likely need to try an order of magnitude or 2 more generated password in order to crack it.

1. https://etherchain.org/account/0x35f5860149e4bbc04b8ac5b272b...

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You should definitively use hashcat[0]. It's the fastest hashing tool at the moment, and it supports both PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 and SCRYPT for Ethereum wallets since the last update.

It can test 588 passwords per second on my modest GPU. I guess that's a lot better than a basic Python script.

You should also have a look at probable wordlists[1], which contains a lot of passwords sorted by their popularity. It could significantly speedup the research, as long as your password has already leaked elsewhere.

[0] https://hashcat.net/hashcat/

[1] https://github.com/berzerk0/Probable-Wordlists

The password definitely hasn't leaked as it is a one time password I created based on a somewhat complex scheme, but switching to hashcat (as also pointed outby flipp3r) seems to be the best next step.

The encryption actually is KECCAK-256, not SHA-3. However, if you are using a library built for Ethereum it'll be called SHA-3.

When Ethereum was being developed, the spec for SHA-3 wasn't finished or something: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/550/which-crypt...

It sounds like you have it under control but I typically point people to Dave @ https://walletrecoveryservices.com/ for the less tech-savvy. He's pretty good. You can look at his site for what he can and can't crack. I know he's super super busy but it never hurts to give him a shout and ask him if he has any pro-tips or open-source code somewhere. A ping from someone who has a basic understanding of encryption might be refreshing.

Here are a random assortment of links I have saved regarding recovering presales: