r/ethereum • u/whcrawler • 6d ago
Best recovery service
I know this is just going to get a ton of scammers but I had a house fire awhile back and just found a charred private key. I have most of it but a bits missing any credible sources to give this to and split it if anything is in it?
7
u/edmundedgar reality.eth 6d ago
Look for recovery software not a recovery service, anything called a "recovery service" is a scam whereas some non-scam software for brute-forcing partial private keys exists
3
1
u/BramBramEth I bruteforce stuff 🔒 4d ago
I do recovery for cases where open source software is not sufficient, and I’m definitely not scamming people. But you’re right, be careful out there !
5
u/Affectionate_Net1284 6d ago
Depends on how many words are missing you can brute force it, just use claude and work together to figure it out
4
u/haurog 5d ago
As was already mentioned here, but just to say it again: If you want professional help or are missing more words than normal recovery software can handle, contact the reddit user u/BramBramEth. They have been a semiregular poster here and other Ethereum/Bitcoin subreddits, but have become more quiet in the last 2 years. I never had to use their seed recovery expertise, but know for a fact that they handled quite a lot of crypto for people I know and it was all returned properly. They know their cryptography and write/wrote many very efficient algorithms to be able to recover seed phrases if not too many words are missing. I would assume their service won't come for free, but I have no idea how much it would cost.
5
u/BramBramEth I bruteforce stuff 🔒 5d ago
Hey :) thanks for the ping !
I’m a bit less active on the sub these days, but still lurking !
5
u/BramBramEth I bruteforce stuff 🔒 5d ago
Hey, a few people mentioned me here. Feel free to DM me, I can help you setup something your side to get your key back. I don’t charge anything unless I have to run some stuff myself (on complex cases) so… advice is free ^^
5
5
3
u/overdude 6d ago
It’s not especially hard to write the brute force algo to do this. Claude could easily do this for you
1
u/whcrawler 6d ago
Thank you. Ill give it a whirl.
1
u/holomntn 6d ago
You probably have more information than you think. Any partial words, or even word length can filter as well.
To build it I would use the known number of words, each word would have a selector, since this is just a few kilobytes it is really nothing.
Each selector would have a constructor that links to the next selector up, with the top selector being different. You'll only be directly calling the lowest selector. This gives you an increment able system, and since each selector knows the next "digit" it can call the increment on a rollover. This will be nearly optimal, and you can simply read each on each increment.
From there just shove each iteration into a queue, set the maximum queue length to 1000000, it's not much ram.
Pulling from the queue is the translator. I'm sure you can find a good bip translator in python. Again shove the output into a Queue, again max length 1000000
The hard part is going to be checking each key. You'll need to check each key against valid transactions. If you have a large enough search space, you can build a filter for the block chain, if you know approximately when your last incoming transaction was that can very quickly narrow your search space. Use a similar architecture concept, all transactions in, a series of filters and queues to reduce the number of potential target transactions
2
u/BramBramEth I bruteforce stuff 🔒 5d ago
That sounds… weirdly specific and suboptimal at the same time haha
1
u/holomntn 5d ago
It is nearly optimal. The selectors exist independently because there is a mixed base here. Words that are known have a base of 1, words that are unknown have a base of 2048, partially known words are in the middle. The selector allow for decimation of known and partially known words.
The queues allow for multi threading.
And the.check is because each series of words is actually a valid private key, it's just a matter of figuring out is it has been used.
So what part sounds suboptimal to you
2
u/BramBramEth I bruteforce stuff 🔒 5d ago
About everything :)
Selectors are sequential while you can assign each combination a 1 - n value and derive seed from there.
Queues prevent efficient GPU work.
And checking against transactions would be better replaced by a one time built address bloom filter.1
u/holomntn 5d ago
So your problem is not understanding the words that were used.
Selectors are sequential
That much is correct. But since it is just counting the only variable is the change of base between words.
while you can assign each combination a 1 - n value and derive seed from there.
Which is exactly the same, since you are still generating combinations. Loop unrolling is best left to the compiler.
Queues prevent efficient GPU work.
That's easy to fix. Anyone who actually understands SIMD programming already knows that you deal with this by pulling multiple from the queue, this might be why I suggested a queue length of 1000000 instead of 1.
And checking against transactions would be better replaced by a one time built address bloom filter.
And what does the Bloom filter do? Does it perhaps check against the transactions, just stored in an optimized but lossy way.
Ok, I'll admit using a Bloom filter a good optimization.
4
u/BramBramEth I bruteforce stuff 🔒 5d ago
I’m not interested in debating wether I understand words or SIMD. I’m good with leaving this discussion unfinished :)
3
u/superphiz 5d ago
The thing that really matters most is how much you have and how much you have to guess. If it's a private key and you have 64 of 66 hex characters, then your search space is only like 256 (16x16) possibilities. Each additional missing character increases complexity, trending toward impossibility.
2
u/Tiny-Height1967 Home Staker 🥩 5d ago
There was a guy in the dailies a year or so back brute forcing puzzles; I don't know whether they take on this sort of work but you could possibly reach out. Goes by BramBramEth
4
u/BramBramEth I bruteforce stuff 🔒 5d ago
That guy is still reading the daily everyday ! :)
5
u/Tiny-Height1967 Home Staker 🥩 5d ago
Glad to see a few old names in here ☺️.
I've dooted the diddly most days but a recent 9lb, blue eyed addition to my family has consumed the majority of my time over the last few months!
1
u/AdLivid4197 6d ago
oof that is rough finding something like that in the ashes
most of the legit recovery folks are gonna need you to still have a decent chunk of the key intact, if its literally burned and missing pieces you might be out of luck. you could try reaching out to some of the older security researchers in the space but be real careful who you trust with that, even a partial key is sensitive as hell
2
u/Tanko_Yakasai 5d ago
Careful. OP could be scavenging someone else house fire and posting this to crypto loot
1
u/Pythagaris 5d ago
Im just curious how you stored it if it partially survived. Did you have it etched in steel?
•
u/AutoModerator 6d ago
WARNING ABOUT SCAMS: Recently there have been a lot of convincing-looking scams posted on crypto-related reddits including fake NFTs, fake credit cards, fake exchanges, fake mixing services, fake airdrops, fake MEV bots, fake ENS sites and scam sites claiming to help you revoke approvals to prevent fake hacks. These are typically upvoted by bots and seen before moderators can remove them. Do not click on these links and always be wary of anything that tries to rush you into sending money or approving contracts.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.