Brainflayer is a Proof-of-Concept brainwallet cracking tool that uses libsecp256k1 for pubkey generation. It was released as part of my DEFCON talk about cracking brainwallets (slides, video, why).

The name is a reference to Mind Flayers, a race of monsters from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. They eat brains, psionically enslave people and look like lovecraftian horrors.

Just because you can steal someone's money doesn't mean you should. Stealing would make you a jerk. Don't be a jerk.

No support will be provided at this time, and I may ignore or close issues requesting support without responding.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Precompute the bloom filter:

hex2blf example.hex example.blf

Run Brainflayer against it:

brainflayer -b example.blf -i phraselist.txt

or

your_generator | brainflayer -b example.blf

Brainflayer's design is heavily influenced by Unix philosophy. It (mostly) does one thing: hunt for tasty brainwallets. A major feature it does not have is generating candidate passwords/passphrases. There are plenty of other great tools that do that, and brainflayer is happy to have you pipe thier output to it.

Unfortunately, brainflayer is not currently multithreaded. If you want to have it keep multiple cores busy, you'll have to come up with a way to distribute the work yourself. In my testing, brainflayer benifits significantly from hyperthreading, so you may want to run two copies per physical core. Also worth noting is that brainflayer mmaps the bloom filter file in shared memory, so additional brainflayer processes do not use up that much additional RAM.

Brainflayer supports a few other types of input via the -t option.

• -t hex hex encoded passwords/passphrases - will be decoded by brainflayer for key derivation

• -t priv hex encoded private keys - this can be used to support arbitrary deterministic wallet schemes via an external program

• -t warp salts or passwords/passphrases for WarpWallet

• -t bwio salts or passwords/passphrases for brainwallet.io

• -t bv2 salts or passwords/passphrases for brainv2 - this one is very slow on CPU, however the parameter choices make it a great target for GPUs and FPGAs

See the output of brainflayer -h for more detailed usage info.

Also included is blfchk - you can pipe it hex encoded hash160 to check a bloom filter file for. It's very fast - it can easily check millions of hash160s per second. Not entirely sure what this is good for but I'm sure you'll come up with something.

Should compile on Linux with make provided you have the required devel libs installed (at least openssl and gpm are required along with libsecp256k1's build dependencies). I really need to learn autotools. If you file an issue about a build failure in libscp256k1 I will close it.

The bulk of Brainflayer was written by Ryan Castellucci. Nicolas Courtois and Guangyan Song contributed the code in ec_pubkey_fast.c which more than doubles the speed of public key computations compared with the stock secp256k1 library from Bitcoin. This code uses a much larger table for ec multiplication and optimized routines for ec addition and doubling.