[RangoWorld]

For those who are not aware 7 ran a unique contest giving away $200 SOL to the winner. He dropped a riddle every single day for 12 days. Each riddle revealed a unique mnemonic seed to the $200 Trust wallet.



All it was needed was to find the 12 right seed words. The person to crack the mnemonic seeds and transfer the money wins.

Contest Thread

Now here's how I did it.

The riddle came in daily to participants via PMs. The first riddle was;

I’m not just good, I go beyond,
With cape or strength, I break the bond.
A comic favorite, admired and bright —
What am I, with extraordinary might?

Answer: super. Pretty easy right?

Except that not all riddles were this easy and you didn't know what your answer for a riddle was until you had all the 12 correct seed words with you. This increased the probability exponentially with every new word introduced.

After the first few riddles I started researching on cryptography, wallet addresses and how wallets work with seeds exactly. I learned that Trust Wallet uses BIP39 Wordlist (A group of 2048 unique words) that make up the said 12 or 24 words seed for the wallet.

This is the case with every wallet. This wallet was protected with 12 seed words.

The BIP39 seed word list contains 2,048 words, so a 12 word seed has about 2048^12 = 2^132 possible combinations. You are probably better off buying a lottery ticket than trying to crack a random wallet, let alone with the prize money in it. Because the world is more likely to end than two people generating the same seed for their wallet.

Anyways, I started getting cracking. After Day 10. I started working on my script in an effort to try and crack the last riddle word even before the riddle is revealed. For that the probability was in around few thousands. But the problem was that you could not know the right word for a single seed. You had to click right on all 12 seed words together. So the probability actually still was in millions.

Here you need to use a bit of ingenuity and try to work things through in your own problem solving style.

I tried solving the 12 riddles again and again and again. Narrowed some down to one or two right answers. Still there was some wiggle room. That's what I thought and I was right. I gave the BIP39 list to ChatGPT and asked it to find me synonyms for each of the seed word that I had narrowed it down.

Then came the last day. I was prepared with my scripts. One of my first scripts was to run through these specified and narrowed down seed combos and try to find wallets with non zero balance on the Sol network. Unfortunately that didn't worked out as the script was passing by wallets without really checking in for balance. I found that out later.

I had tried over a million combinations and none worked.

Though luckily even after the 12 riddles were revealed that wallet was still not cracked but I was about to give up. Until an idea sparked and I quickly designed another script to generate me all valid seed combinations for Sol addresses. Which is not every combo, since not every seed combination translates into a valid address. I was left with 30 odd seeds.



30 odd seeds were in valid_seeds.txt file. You can see 3 scripts here ending with .py

Then I manually tried pasting it and one of them worked!

Riddle 5 and Riddle 10 were the hardest for me. Riddle 5's right answer was "Lumber" and I was stuck on being "Wood" for too long. That's where ChatGPT helped me find synonym for it and I think that did the deal for me at the end as I had gotten the other words pretty much right on.

I'm not a pro "hacker" or anything like that. People here maybe more skilled in coding and various tasks than me. But problem solving skills matters more than anything else. That's what I learned through this contest and that's what I want to say to you all.

It doesn't matter what approach or method you take for solving anything, as long as it works!

Lastly I want to Thank 7 again for running this contest. It was a truly unique contest. One of a kind and I have told him, "HackForums" fitting contest. I implore all of you to checkout the original thread. He has hinted on running these kind of contests in the near future as well. I definitely had a good time.

Thanks for reading! ✌

[_V0X]

Congratulations! I currently didn't have the headspace or time to compete. So hopefully theres another one soon!

[Trust]

My brain hurt reading this, but I'm glad somebody managed to crack the code.
Congratulations!

[plops]

Congrats man,
Cryptography and riddles are very frustrating imo. Good on you for your paitence and persistence.

[blackhat314]

There is 0 chance I would have gotten this but congrats on winning!

[Jamika]

For those who are not aware 7 ran a unique contest giving away $200 SOL to the winner. He dropped a riddle every single day for 12 days. Each riddle revealed a unique mnemonic seed to the $200 Trust wallet.



All it was needed was to find the 12 right seed words. The person to crack the mnemonic seeds and transfer the money wins.

Contest Thread

Now here's how I did it.

The riddle came in daily to participants via PMs. The first riddle was;


Answer: super. Pretty easy right?

Except that not all riddles were this easy and you didn't know what your answer for a riddle was until you had all the 12 correct seed words with you. This increased the probability exponentially with every new word introduced.

After the first few riddles I started researching on cryptography, wallet addresses and how wallets work with seeds exactly. I learned that Trust Wallet uses BIP39 Wordlist (A group of 2048 unique words) that make up the said 12 or 24 words seed for the wallet.

This is the case with every wallet. This wallet was protected with 12 seed words.

The BIP39 seed word list contains 2,048 words, so a 12 word seed has about 2048^12 = 2^132 possible combinations. You are probably better off buying a lottery ticket than trying to crack a random wallet, let alone with the prize money in it. Because the world is more likely to end than two people generating the same seed for their wallet.

Anyways, I started getting cracking. After Day 10. I started working on my script in an effort to try and crack the last riddle word even before the riddle is revealed. For that the probability was in around few thousands. But the problem was that you could not know the right word for a single seed. You had to click right on all 12 seed words together. So the probability actually still was in millions.

Here you need to use a bit of ingenuity and try to work things through in your own problem solving style.

I tried solving the 12 riddles again and again and again. Narrowed some down to one or two right answers. Still there was some wiggle room. That's what I thought and I was right. I gave the BIP39 list to ChatGPT and asked it to find me synonyms for each of the seed word that I had narrowed it down.

Then came the last day. I was prepared with my scripts. One of my first scripts was to run through these specified and narrowed down seed combos and try to find wallets with non zero balance on the Sol network. Unfortunately that didn't worked out as the script was passing by wallets without really checking in for balance. I found that out later.

I had tried over a million combinations and none worked.

Though luckily even after the 12 riddles were revealed that wallet was still not cracked but I was about to give up. Until an idea sparked and I quickly designed another script to generate me all valid seed combinations for Sol addresses. Which is not every combo, since not every seed combination translates into a valid address. I was left with 30 odd seeds.



30 odd seeds were in valid_seeds.txt file. You can see 3 scripts here ending with .py

Then I manually tried pasting it and one of them worked!

Riddle 5 and Riddle 10 were the hardest for me. Riddle 5's right answer was "Lumber" and I was stuck on being "Wood" for too long. That's where ChatGPT helped me find synonym for it and I think that did the deal for me at the end as I had gotten the other words pretty much right on.

I'm not a pro "hacker" or anything like that. People here maybe more skilled in coding and various tasks than me. But problem solving skills matters more than anything else. That's what I learned through this contest and that's what I want to say to you all.

It doesn't matter what approach or method you take for solving anything, as long as it works!

Lastly I want to Thank 7 again for running this contest. It was a truly unique contest. One of a kind and I have told him, "HackForums" fitting contest. I implore all of you to checkout the original thread. He has hinted on running these kind of contests in the near future as well. I definitely had a good time.

Thanks for reading! ✌

Nice work , congrats bro , now send me some lol

[Regulus]

My brain hurt reading this, but I'm glad somebody managed to crack the code.
Congratulations!

Vouch for this, didn't even get the first phrases here.
But congrats to OP, well deserved!

[Pr0m3th3us]

What program did you use to read the scripts and try the combinations?

[RangoWorld]

What program did you use to read the scripts and try the combinations?

Python.

There are also plenty of resources available online on wallet recovery, wordlist, and combinatorics.

[7]

Great initiative.

I like how you did your research and also explained to others.
Congratulations on winning but more congratulations on your thought process.

[Pr0m3th3us]

Python.

There are also plenty of resources available online on wallet recovery, wordlist, and combinatorics.

Ahh ok got it. Really legit work your did, must have been super satisfying hitting that transfer SOL button. You earned it man.

[RangoWorld]

Ahh ok got it. Really legit work your did, must have been super satisfying hitting that transfer SOL button. You earned it man.

I was a little nervous when I pressed the button as time was running out virtually. Lol

[Pr0m3th3us]

I was a little nervous when I pressed the button as time was running out virtually. Lol

Something I was wondering also, what if 30 seconds after you recovered the wallet with the seed someone else was trying to do it also. Would it have allowed them?

[7]

Something I was wondering also, what if 30 seconds after you recovered the wallet with the seed someone else was trying to do it also. Would it have allowed them?

Yes it would allow both I believe... just whoever withdrew the money first won

[Omniscient]

Great initiative.

I like how you did your research and also explained to others.
Congratulations on winning but more congratulations on your thought process.

More of items like that would attract some new members imho.