Hardware hacker Joe Grand and his team successfully retrieved $3 million worth of Bitcoin from a software wallet that had been inaccessible since 2013. Grand, renowned for his expertise in hardware hacking, collaborated with his friend Bruno, skilled in software hacking, on this unprecedented project.

The story began when Michael, the wallet’s owner, approached Grand after seeing a video demonstrating Grand’s hacking of a hardware wallet. Michael had used a password generator called RoboForm to create a highly secure 20-character password, which he saved in an encrypted text file. Unfortunately, the partition containing the password became corrupted, making the password unrecoverable.

Initially hesitant due to the complexity of brute-forcing such a password, Grand and Bruno revisited the project a year later. Inspired by Bruno’s reverse engineering work on another password generator, they opted to target the RoboForm program itself rather than directly attacking the password. They discovered vulnerabilities in older versions of RoboForm related to randomness generation.

Their approach involved using tools like Cheat Engine and Ghidra for reverse engineering. Cheat Engine enabled them to search the program’s memory to locate where the password was stored, confirming they were targeting the correct part of the program. Ghidra, a decompilation tool developed by the NSA, was crucial in deciphering the machine code to identify the password generation logic.

A breakthrough occurred when they found that the system time influenced password generation. By manipulating time values, they could reproduce the password, suggesting weaknesses in the randomness of older RoboForm versions.

Grand and Bruno wrote code to manipulate the password generator, wrapping its original function to control its output. They adjusted system time to generate millions of potential passwords. Despite facing challenges such as system crashes and extensive debugging, they persisted. Adjusting their strategy based on refined password parameters provided by Michael, they eventually succeeded in generating the correct password within minutes.

This achievement brought relief and joy to Michael and underscored the power of innovative problem-solving and collaborative hacking expertise in cybersecurity. Grand’s approach highlighted the intricacies and vulnerabilities of software-based security systems, emphasizing the critical role of secure random number generation in cryptographic applications.

This project not only recovered substantial assets but also showcased the effectiveness of combining hardware and software hacking skills. It underscored the importance of periodically updating passwords generated by specific software and highlighted Grand’s YouTube channel, which features numerous successful recoveries of lost Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies from devices like Ledger and Trezor.