Crypto recovery firm Unciphered has offered its services to Stefan Thomas, the former Chief Technology Officer of Ripple, in an effort to unlock his IronKey hard drive. This hard drive holds 7,002 Bitcoins, valued at $244 million, which remain inaccessible due to a forgotten password.
Unciphered proposed their assistance to Thomas on Thursday, challenging the crypto principle "Not your Keys, Not your Coins," arguing for broader property rights. The firm's team of cryptographers and reverse engineers reportedly have the capabilities to breach high-security devices such as Thomas's IronKey, a government-grade device.
The company's "Project Everest" has been instrumental in this process. In this project, they reverse-engineered firmware and inter-chip communication protocols to decode IronKey's system and identified a vulnerability for device access. In partnership with journalist Andy Greenberg, Unciphered successfully breached an IronKey he had secured and invited Thomas to witness their fund retrieval process.
Unciphered asserts that it has developed a novel approach to breach the hardware and retrieve the keys after "200 trillion tries" using offline servers. This permits countless password attempts until success is achieved. The company's previous successes in cracking similar devices and their innovative methods offer hope for those grappling with similar crypto recovery challenges.
The recent years have seen a surge in lost Bitcoin access, with an estimated 20% of Bitcoin’s total supply (equivalent to billions of dollars) locked away indefinitely. As such, the work of firms like Unciphered is becoming increasingly important in the crypto landscape.
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