Profanity Bug. How to Save Your ETH?

Profanity is a tool that is used to generate vanity addresses in Ethereum. What is a vanity address? It's an address that is generated taking into account the personal requirements of the user. This can be compared to how we choose an “attractive” phone number when buying a SIM card. That is, the address that is generated using Profanity has personalized properties. At the same time, in theory, this address still complies with security standards.

Profanity is an open source tool that you can find on Github. For the most part, Profanity code is written in C++. It is also noted on Github that the developer has abandoned his creation.

How does Profanity work? There are several steps in the operation of this tool (data from the 1inch Network blog):

1. Randomly select 1 of 4 bln seed private keys.
2. Expand it deterministically to 2 mln private keys.
3. Derive public keys from these private keys.
4. Repeatedly increment them until they reach the desired vanity address.

What happened to Profanity and why should you change your addresses if they were generated using Profanity? At the beginning of the year “some of the 1inch contributors noticed that Profanity used a random 32-bit vector to seed 256-bit private keys and suspected it could be unsafe.”

At first, the 1inch participants planned “to recompute all the vanity addresses by reseeding all 4 bln initial vectors.” It would be long, it would require a lot of computing power. Also, at first, it was believed that “8+ character vanity addresses were quite safe.”

But, problems began to appear in June. One of the 1inch participants received “a strange message” from @samczsun – researcher from Paradigm (a crypto/Web3 investment firm). The message described “suspicious activity of one of the 1inch deployer wallets, as well as Synthetix’ and some others.”

Suspicious activity was also reported by users on Twitter.

The 1inch team checked the richest vanity addresses and found that these addresses were most likely covertly hacked.

“The 1inch contributors checked the richest vanity addresses on popular networks and came to the conclusion that most of them were not created by the Profanity tool. But Profanity is one of the most popular tools due to its high efficiency. Sadly, that could only mean that most of the Profanity wallets were secretly hacked.”

The problem now is to determine the hacked addresses. According to 1inch, “It’s not a simple task, but at this point, it looks like tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency could be stolen, if not hundreds of millions.”

We recently wrote that Wintermute lost $160M during a hacker attack. In addition to internal tools, they used Profanity to generate addresses too.

According to Twitter user @zachxbt, in addition to Wintermute's losses, another $3.3m in crypto has been drained from various wallets.

We, like 1inch, advise our dear readers to transfer their assets from the addresses generated using Profanity. Also, it is worth changing the owners of a smart contract if its address was created using Profanity. We continue to observe.