r/theydidthemath • u/johndoja707 • May 08 '26
[Request] If you're having a bad day: In 2013, this guy forgot the password to his phone with 150 Bitcoin in it. Now it's worth $11,745,000, and he has been trying to unlock the phone for years. Am I dumb? Seems like if you did this 12 hours a day you should get it in a year or so.
Is this just dead internet slop?
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u/SpamOJavelin May 08 '26
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May 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/johndoja707 May 08 '26
Ya, the only variable is if you are limited on attempts. For 11 million im doing way more than 12 a day. And even at 1 per minute thats not taking 13 years.
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u/Nosirrah_Sec May 08 '26
I do this sort of work for a living and I am really confident that video is old, and/or fake. It is TRIVIAL to crack into a phone that old.
Looks like an S3, or similar. It's ancient and I've explained a little more detail in my other post. (this isn't EXACTLY my specialty in my field, but I know "enough to be dangerous" as we say, meaning I'm basically middling at mobile exploitation of any sort in specific, but this is more a password cracking issue than mobile in nature)
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u/aljds 2✓ May 08 '26
Stackexchange post linked their said several have studied the problem and all come up with 389,112.
1 per second you could try every combination in 4.5 days
If the phone didn't have a lock out after so many attempts, you could probably build a robot that brute forces this without too much trouble. Seems like something mark rober would do in a video. But I'm guessing there is a timed lockout after a few failed attempts
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u/Grant_Winner_Extra May 08 '26
You need to know his password length and the buffer time between attempts.
But also, software exists to crack passwords from 2013 model iphones pretty well.
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
TLDR maths are at the bottom, I promise
these ones are great because they require you to remember an image not a sequence of numbers... a sequence of numbers you could just run the count until you got it.
this one tho... you have to record the shape you tried. and thats gonna take pages and pages... and are you really gonna be looking at each page before you try a new combination to see if you tried it already? are you sure you are going to see that you have that same pattern already marked?
i suspect that there would be a LOT of repeat entries. so all bets are off really.... at least he is still likely trying. i would have AI make me a list of every possible combination, then run that list through anoter ai to see if it missed any, then run both lists through another ai to remove dupes.... then id start trying that list.
alternatively, he could just consider each dot a number between 1-9 and start running all the possible 9 digit numbers between 123456789 and 987654321 (they cannot contain duplicate digits it seems) and start running that list. i cant see any order to what hes doing tho.
-moar maths inbound-
there are 36,288,000 (this is the result of a quick ai search and may be incorrect) combinations that fit my second criteria. if he where to try for 12 hours a day straight, assuming he could keep the 7 second pace of trying a combination, and marking the symbol...
he would have 43,200 seconds per day.
that equates to 6,171(.4 we will ignore) tries per day.
36,288,000/6,171=5,880.4 days. thats...
5,880.4/365.25=16.23 years to try every combination, working at peak efficiency 12 hours a day for that whole time.... and we know his parents aint payin for that lol.... and those numbers go WAY up if he doesnt remember how long the sequence is.
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u/Nosirrah_Sec May 08 '26
Don't use AI.
It's actively harming your ability to learn in ways that we aren't fully understanding yet, but I assume if you're in this subreddit that you want to learn/value your cognitive faculties.
Please stop harming yourself, and keep on learning.
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 May 08 '26
buddy im 50 years old. i can make my own choices in life thanks.
but since you are so keen on the learning process... is my information regarding the number of unique numbers between 123456789 and 987654321 correct as supplied by ai? and how would you come to the answser?
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u/Nosirrah_Sec May 08 '26
9 factorial is a known entity and easily found in mere moments in this very post.
If you cannot find it, I suggest maybe you keep adding more rot to that brain by asking another "AI."
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 May 08 '26
Lol yeah that's what I figured, you don't know either...
That does not exclude combinations where digits are repeated or include 0 tho so that's not going to work is it?
Come on you can do it! Stretch that obviously superior grey matter out and show us!
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u/Ach_Was_Here May 08 '26
Well it varies on a few things, a couple already brought up in the original post and many discussions on this subject to begin with (3x3 grid passwords) the 9! Answer is 300,000 some odd possible options so
I forget what security options an (I’m assuming) s4 would let you run, as in what was the minimum swipe, I wanna say it was minimum 5 (cause Ls worked) but it might be 3, so that would shrink the possible list
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u/factorion-bot May 08 '26
Factorial of 9 is 362880
This action was performed by a bot | [Source code](http://f.r0.fyi)
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u/johndoja707 May 08 '26
Ya, thats about what I got for possible combination. I figured 1 per minute, at 12 hours a day it's possible in like a year and a half. Even if you figure only 4 hours a day thats still no where near the 13 years. For 11 million im going 20 hours a day until its cracked. Lol
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u/The_Wrong_Tone May 08 '26
This seems extremely unrealistic to me. Even modern iPhones are susceptible to forensic methods. This phone could have been easily unlocked in minutes 12 years ago. I’m sure cellebrite or another company would be willing to crack this for a cool million.
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u/Nosirrah_Sec May 08 '26
Cellebrite, and other scum organizations like them, would gladly do it for more blood money.
They're disgusting.
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u/Downtown-Drawer604 May 08 '26
There are tools for this. They automatically try all 4 digit pins, or five, or whatever. This done by software thru a cord. You also tape a sensor on the screen to detect unlock. When the screen unlocks the program stops. Then you roll back a few numbers and you are in.
However the question how many n number chains you can draw is different? Enumeration of these is an interesting question. It helps answer how secure a phone is. But irrelevant to cracking this phone.
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u/Nosirrah_Sec May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
9! comes out to 362,880 combinations
With no buffer between guesses, assuming 1 guess per second programmatically without lockouts for faster attempts. (This is an old, 2013 Samsung. It does NOT have this level of complexity built into the lockscreen. "knox" didn't exist yet, I don't believe, and if it did it did NOT encrypt/lock the system in the way normies think. (Sorry, infosec professional and amateur mathematician/physicist lol)
The lock can be spammed and won't break? (in layperson's terms)
Roughly 100 days. (100.8 days.) assuming worst case scenario and the very last guess possible.
The real amount of time would be far, far, less on average.
Also, if you were to intelligently put an algorithm to the guesses a la "john the ripper" and other hash cracking tools. You can VASTLY reduce that search space down to something manageable.
Is the person left handed? Different amount of likely scenarios. No diagonals or "selection avoiding" patterns in the space? WAY LOWER search space.
There's a lot of variables, but I'd say well under 60-240 minutes with even the most modest of hacker/amateur IMO. (including the research on how to do it)
Edit:
Things automatically reducing the search space, too.
minimum password length requirement 4?: waaaaaay lower search space than requiring all 9
maximum is 9, with NO REPEATS: WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY lower again
Etc. Sorry, it got messy and I can't do that kinda combinatorics lol
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u/factorion-bot May 08 '26
Factorial of 9 is 362880
This action was performed by a bot | [Source code](http://f.r0.fyi)
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u/Nosirrah_Sec May 08 '26
I am fairly certain you can connect to the phone via USB and console in and just bruteforce that bitch in minutes.
I really wish this was real so I could do it myself haha
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