Gavin Andresen - 2011-06-20 12:35:39

RE: making it harder to brute-force:

I have a couple of thoughts.  First, if users choose passwords like 'abc123' or 'password' or any of the other top-1,000 passwords it doesn't matter if we're scrypt'ing; they're toast. I'd rather see work on either giving users feedback on how strong or weak their password is rather than adding a tiny-little-bit-more security by scrypting.

That said, changing the 'ekey' data so that ONLY the 256-bit private key is encrypted should increase security with very little extra code. Consider what you'd have to do to brute-force:

1000 x SHA256(password_text)

Now you have a 256-bit number.  Is it the right private key?  To check:
ECC multiply to get candidate public key
RIPEMD160(SHA256(candidate public key)), and check to see if it matches public key.

Anybody know how easy it is to GPU parallelize ECC multiplies?  A quick google search gives me the impression that is an area of active research.


RE: pre-computing wallet keys:  Huh??  wallet private keys are 256-bit random numbers.  Am I misunderstanding you gmaxwell?