Re: hardening brain-wallets with a useful blind proof of work

Quote from: gmaxwell on October 16, 2013, 07:22:25 AM

Quote from: oakpacific on October 16, 2013, 04:37:44 AM

Your brain is trained to memorize phrases, not random alphabet-number-symbol mix, it may indeed be the case that people can keep long series of english phrases in their memory longer than just some random strings, even if the length of the phrase series is much longer.

Who said anything about "random alphabet-number-symbol mix"? Alphabet-number-symbol mix is terrible cargo cult security and shouldn't be used. Go reread my posts. Good schemes for memorization use a mnemonic encoding that translates large integers to and from english text.

Though generally the properties that make phrases _easy_ to memorize are what actually produce the statistical properties that make them easy to predict. But predictability is resolved by using a lossless encoding process with known entropy rather than a human source.

(And memorization still has a rather severe forgetting problem. Like people overestimate their ability to be random, we also over estimate the integrity of our memory. The public has very little experience handling keys which cannot ever be recovered if lost.)

Now since you were the one talking about the unreliability of common folks in generating dictionary passwords(like how can they not follow proper procedures), maybe you could also talk about how difficult it would be for people to use such mnemonic encodings?

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Brainwallet is mainly designed to solve the deniability problem,

I actually have IRC logs about the creation of the phrase brainwallet and brainwallet.org. It was created by someone who introduction to the subject matter was his own efforts to crack peoples insecure keys, and he was irritated that he only found a few coins. No kidding. Don't try to glorify history to people who watched it first hand.

Now don't speculate on my intentions as it's unproductive, to my best knowledge(and I suspect a lot of people) it was Jon Matonis who came up with the idea of brainwallet, and he made it clear in the Forbes article that deniability was his major concern. If you have some first-hand secret history, it would be way more helpful if you could please just share it.

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... (1) Perhaps you should engage in less unlawful activity.

Hmm...you do realize there are places in the world where doing completely legal things can get you arrested right?

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(2) you're going to be rather disappointed when you realize how complete computer forensics is, hiding a key will probably be the least of your concerns.

Maybe, it would be interesting to see what FBI could do with Ross Ulbricht's bitcoins.