Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit!

This innovative talk will mix DIY, emerging technologies and computer security. First part of the talk will explain how to build your own low-cost, powerful, totally silent and ecological password cracker using a cheap and publicly available FPGA board, with an introduction to FPGA programming for that purpose. Second part will deal about building a collaborative marketplace where everybody can share uncracked password hashes and give a reward for the solutions, and where people can help providing solutions to get those rewards in a completely decentralized way, by developing and using a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain.

Transcript

1. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! Renaud Lifchitz
2. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 2 Developing a home-made password cracker
3. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 3 What is a FPGA? • 2 base elements – LUTs: look-up tables – Flip-flop: elements to delay propagation • Optionally: – RAM blocks – Hardware multipliers – DSPs
4. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 4 FPGA usage • Signal processing: SDR • Logic analyzer • Fault injection • Side-channel attacks: timing attacks, DPA, CPA, … (ex.: ChipWhisperer)
5. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 5 Our target board • Digilent PYNQ-Z1 FPGA development board • Hand-sized • Very good value for the money • No fan, completly silent • Very low consumption: a few Watts (typical light bulb: 60W) • http://www.pynq.io/ • Price: 200€ (academic price: 100€)
6. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 6 Our target board Features • Xilinx SoC FPGA with dual ARM CPU – 33280 logic cells in 5200 slices (four 6-input LUTs and 8 flip-flops / slice) – 1800 Kbits of fast block RAM – Internal clock speeds exceeding 450 MHz • 256MB DDR3L with a 16-bit bus @ 667MHz • 16MB Quad-SPI Flash • Connectivity: – 10/100 Mbps Ethernet – USB-UART bridge – USB-JTAG programming circuitry – Arduino shield connector – SD card reader • 4 switches, 4 buttons, 1 reset button, 4 LEDs, 4 RGB LEDs
7. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 7 FPGA programming • Very different from procedural programming • Behavioral programming • Hard learning curve • Every statement in the same block is executed at the same time • For successive statements, you must use a state machine • 2 main languages: – VHDL (strongly typed, mostly used in Europe) – Verilog (mostly used in the US and worldwide) • You can practice online: https://www.edaplayground.com/
8. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 8 FPGA programming VHDL sample code reg1: process (rst, clk) begin if rst = '1' then q_reg <= (others => '0'); q_i <= (others => '0'); elsif rising_edge(clk) then if s_l = '1' then q_i(0) <= q_i(7); loop1: for i in 6 downto 0 loop q_i(i + 1) <= q_i(i); end loop loop1; q_reg <= y; else q_i <= q_reg; q_reg <= y; end if; end if; end process reg1;
9. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 9 FPGA programming Verilog sample code always @(posedge CLK or posedge RST) begin if (RST) begin q_reg = 0; Q = 0; end else if (S_L) begin Q[7:0] = {Q[6:0],Q[7]}; q_reg = Y; end else begin Q = q_reg; q_reg = Y; end end
10. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 10 High Level Synthesis (HLS) • Programming everything in HDL is hard, especially when you have to deal with complex hardware interfaces (Ethernet, USB, …) • It’s easier to use existing stacks in C either: – On a CPU core of the FPGA SoC – Or on a CPU softcore in the FPGA! using a normal C compiler • Event coding the normal logic can be a pain if the state machine is big • Xilinx provides a nice commercial SDK including a C-to-HDL compiler (Vivado HLS)
11. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 11 Using the password cracker • Interface: UART over USB to submit a hash and view the result • Code is too crapy to be published • Limited to incremental bruteforce attack for the moment (I’m not an FPGA expert!) • But performance is roughly the same than a GPU, with a lower price, consumption, occupied space and noise! 
12. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 12 Building a decentralized password hashes marketplace
13. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 13 A password marketplace? • A common task for security auditors: assess the strength of password hashes • A test on a single CPU/GPU for a few hours is usually not enough compared to motivated attackers • So the idea is to build a collaborative marketplace with incentives to help: – people submit their password hashes with given rewards – the one who solves a hash is given the corresponding reward
14. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 14 A fully decentralized application? (1/2) • We need a fully decentralized application to avoid cheating, censorship, DDoS, downtime… • Several parts should be decentralized: – web back-end (core logic/app) – web front-end (storage of HTML/JS/CSS) – domain name (storage and resolver)
15. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 15 A fully decentralized application? (2/2) • I have chosen Ethereum technology with some beta components: – web back-end: Ethereum smart contract – web front-end: Ethereum Swarm – domain name: Ethereum Name Service (ENS)
16. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 16 Anti-cheat tricks • For the submitter: – You pay the reward in advance and it is locked (no insolvency) • For the solver: – You have to pay a small fee to submit an answer (no bruteforce) – Answer is verified by thousands of nodes (no corrupted server) • For all users: – Decentralized application (no DoS/DDoS, downtime)
17. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 17 The Ethereum blockchain • https://www.ethereum.org/ • More than 38,000 online nodes!: https://www.ethernodes.org most secured/trustable blockchain nowadays  • Average block/transaction time: 15 seconds • Allows safe execution of logic through smart contracts • Allow payments with its digital currency, ether (ETH): https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ • “Ethereum: the World Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j23HnORQXvs
18. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 18 Decentralized name service: Ethereum Name Service (ENS) • An ENS entry can map a .eth name to: – an individual Ethereum account – a content hash for decentralized storage (Swarm or IPFS) • ENS official web site: https://ens.domains/ • Booking an entry: https://registrar.ens.domains/ • ENS stats: https://ens.codetract.io/
19. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 19 Decentralized storage: Ethereum Swarm • Peer-to-peer storage and serving solution • DDOS-resistant, zero-downtime, fault-tolerant, censorship-resistant and self-sustaining with incentives (soon) • Swarm protocol: bzz:// • Swarm official web site is stored using… Swarm and is also a Swarm gateway: – http://swarm-gateways.net/ redirects to http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/theswarm.eth/ – theswarm.eth resolves to 0x9b34db0158bad197cb28b374c79cd4090d5d75e197d0f118a8fc23835f3a22e0 – http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/9b34db0158bad197cb28b374c79cd4090d5d75e197d0f118a8fc23835f3a22e0/ • Other examples: – Photo album: http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/photoalbum.eth/ – Rickroll GIF: http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/2c2b937364f283c3ee82bc70542849f850c88abf1d10c0264a96fa8fe7da81da
20. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 20 Decentralized apps: smart contracts • A smart contract is an application core • Once deployed: – No one can modify the code or stop its execution – The code runs simultaneously on all the nodes • Smart contract + web front-end = “dApp” (https://dapps.ethercasts.com/) • Ethereum smart contracts main programming language: Solidity
21. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 21 Solidity basics • High-level language, syntax similar to JavaScript • Compiled to bytecode then deployed on the blockchain • Designed to target the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) • Statically typed, supports inheritance, libraries, complex user- defined types... • Ability to create contracts for voting, crowdfunding, blind auctions, multi-signature wallets and more! • Official documentation: https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/
22. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 22 Solidity code example Sequestration of funds until 30th July 2020 (https://hodlethereum.com/deposit)
23. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 23 Developing & deploying the smart contract • Contract can be written using Browser Solidity: https://ethereum.github.io/browser-solidity/ • Contract can be tested using Truffle framework: http://truffleframework.com/ or Ethereum testnet (currently “Ropsten”) • Contract can be deployed & used using: – Parity: https://parity.io/ – Mist: https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
24. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 24 Using the marketplace bzz:/passwords.eth
25. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 25 A few words... • Nice and usable proof-of-concept but: – Limited to SHA256 hashes for the moment: lack of other interesting hash functions in the EVM, and high transaction fees to develop new ones  a solution would be to use a trusted oracle – Code is quite ugly, need some fixes before being published • Use it, share it, and audit your passwords!
26. Build your own low-cost password cracker on the blockchain for fun and profit! - Renaud Lifchitz 26 Thank you! Any questions? Ethereum: 0x0009Fd382E99dDD801736Ea4075a2eE5e4916B72 ENS: nono2357.eth Tips are welcome!  @nono2357