Cryptocurrency Wallet Passphrase Cracking

In recent years, many of you have probably seen news stories about people who had millions of dollars of some cryptocurrency available to them, usually on a long-forgotten computer. However, they had forgotten the password to the wallet software itself, rendering the cryptocurrency inaccessible. Sometimes users may remember the scheme used to construct the password, which can be helpful as we have seen in discussion of features such as mask attacks; but in any case, we may need to leverage cracking to try and recover access to a cryptocurrency wallet in these situations.

The purpose of this chapter is to give you the tools needed to attempt to recover passphrases for cryptocurrency wallets in some of these situations; while we will not cover every cryptocurrency, you will get a start on some common coins, and from there, you can analyze the given situation at hand and adapt your approach to match.

In this chapter, we will cover the following...