I wasn't aware of that, I have had no Windows for years now.

7zip seems to use AES256, that may be ok. But you have to choose a strong password, the 5 characters, that somebody suggested, are way too small. I am talking about 12 or more charakters, which are from different types and are not corresponding with dictionary words or keyboard patterns.

There are several ways of brute force cracking. Did you call the 7z-extractor for each password? No attacker would do that!

Have you tried this?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzcracker/files/
or this?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rarcrack/files/rarcrack-0.2/%5BUnnamed%20release%5D/

Send me an archive with 5 alphanumeric characters, I could crack it today! (Somebody who would put some effort in writing his own 7zip-tools would be much faster.)

I have only used gpg4win via cmd.exe. No problems for me. Running windows is another issue altogether...

Of course, use whatever tools you are most comfortable with. Just realize that not all crypto is created equal. Caveat emptor. When wallets start holding tens of thousands of dollars worth of BTC, I would not trust an archiver.

Oh my but I must lament once again how horrible this wallet problem is! Bitcoin's reputation is going to get creamed in the media until this is solved. You brilliant tech heads have a monster by the tail. So now let me slog through one of your opaque posts here, parsing and probing to uncover the nugget of truth for the uninitiated (like ME) to put to use...


Whoa there! I have used gpg in thunderbird to encrypt email but using it in my operating system is new to me because for one thing, at what point did I generate a key pair? Where is this private key?  Another observation is that though you criticize truecrypt, at least it has a visual interface instead of this command line shit. Sorry if this offends...


Whoa there!  What do you mean?  Why would I just happen to HAVE a GPG key?  Where would it come from? But not having to mess with keypairs is an advantage anyway.


So I now need to scan a printout with character recognition software....you truly live in a different world than most people. No offense you brilliant tech head but this situation is terrible.

if you were going the printing out a paper route, why not just print out your wallet file and delete the original?

Laser engraving on a metal plate would be better

http://content.wuala.com/contents/entropiahost/Share/bitcoinpassword.7z?dl=1

There you go. 294 bytes. Five chars alpha-lowercase and numeric password. If you successfully crack it, you can give me the password that is contained inside the textfile.

I'll consider a small donation for the good of the community considering that it improves our security, especially since I think this little 294 bytes archive could be broken in 2 months, and not 24 hours.

When decrypting my wallet it gets stored unencrypted in my hard drive right? Sure, I can shred and delete it after re-encrypting but that's a security risk TrueCrypt doesn't have.

Btw, I didn't read the whole Schneier paper but the abstract only talks about losing deniability under Windows with TrueCrypt version 5. Should I still be concerned about this using TrueCrypt v7 under Linux?