No More Worries about Losing Your Wallet! AI Can Help Retrieve Virtual Assets
As the cryptocurrency market continues to grow, the diversity and complexity of assets also increase. The popularity of this market is fueled by advanced technology and innovative applications, but it also leads to a larger number of lost and unrecoverable assets.
According to estimates, there are currently billions of dollars worth of virtual currencies in the market that are in a state of limbo due to unforeseen events such as forgotten passwords or hardware failures.
Research suggests that out of the total supply of 21 million bitcoins, approximately 6 million bitcoins are considered lost. The potential reasons for this include forgotten passwords, hardware damage, or the owners of the assets no longer being alive.
Furthermore, 29% of bitcoins have not been moved in the past five years. While this may include long-term investors or users engaged in long-term transactions, a significant portion of these bitcoins are simply lost due to users forgetting their passwords or being unable to access them due to technical issues.
For example, in 2013, a British man named James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins. The current value of these bitcoins on the market is needless to say, and the hard drive is now buried in a landfill. Former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas also revealed that he owns 7,002 bitcoins stored in the private key of a hardware wallet called IronKey, but he has forgotten the password. He only has two attempts left out of the remaining 10, and if he fails, the private key and the 7,002 bitcoins will be permanently lost.
However, the fortunate news is that these lost digital assets can now potentially be recovered with the development of artificial intelligence. Regardless of the value of a user’s assets, cryptocurrency wallet recovery services can help users recover lost bitcoins or ethers from software or hardware wallets.
Due to unforeseen events such as forgotten passwords or hardware failures, there are currently billions of dollars worth of virtual currencies in the market that are in a state of limbo.
Three Key Technological Advancements: Making Password Recovery Easier
AI: Analyzing User Behavior and Guessing Passwords
The first technological advancement is AI training models, particularly OpenAI’s GPT-2 model like PASS-GPT, which has become a front-end technology for recovering digital assets.
PASS-GPT can analyze vast amounts of data regarding user behavior, password patterns, and other relevant information. Through this analysis, the model can identify potential password structures and common vocabulary to predict the passwords that users might have set. PASS-GPT can also generate a series of difficult-to-decipher password combinations using a technique called progressive sampling, which is crucial for brute-force attacks as it efficiently produces password options that are not easily guessed. Testing has shown that PASS-GPT has a 20% higher password guessing ability compared to other models.
GPU, CPU: Providing Computational Power
The next advancement leverages the power of modern GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) and CPUs (Central Processing Units) to enhance the computational capabilities of the aforementioned AI models.
GPUs were initially designed for processing computer graphics and game images. They excel in performing parallel computations efficiently. In other words, GPUs can simultaneously handle thousands of computational tasks, making them highly suitable for brute-force attacks involved in password guessing.
In such attacks, computers attempt every possible password combination until the correct one is found. With GPUs’ fast processing power, AI models like PASS-GPT can be combined effectively with hardware to create a powerful computing system.
Preventing Side-Channel Attacks
Lastly, recovering encrypted wallet passwords requires the capability to prevent side-channel attacks (SCA).
Side-channel attacks are a type of security attack that does not directly crack passwords but exploits vulnerabilities in the physical signals (such as power consumption and electromagnetic radiation) generated during computer encryption operations to obtain key information. For instance, if attackers can detect minute changes in hardware power consumption during specific operations, they may be able to deduce certain parts of the ongoing encryption operation or key.
To protect cryptocurrencies from such attacks, many AI algorithm experts are developing and deploying new strategies and techniques. These include increasing randomness during the encryption process, improving algorithm design to resist side-channel attacks by ensuring that the algorithm’s operation and execution time do not differ significantly based on different secret information (such as passwords or keys), and using dedicated hardware components designed specifically to consume similar amounts of power during different operations, thus countering side-channel attacks.
The security of bitcoin and other virtual currencies works in both directions, ensuring a certain level of security, but it can also be a barrier to their recovery. Fortunately, advancements in AI technology, hardware computational capabilities, and algorithm design have opened up new possibilities and brought more hope to users who have inadvertently lost their assets.
Article Source:
PANews
Proofread by: Gao Jingyuan