Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Wintermute is an Automated Market Maker (AMM).

The hack wasn't anything that Wintermute actually did wrong. This time, it was a Vanity wallet generator called Profanity. Using this, it can generate a string of characters into the wallet that is easy to remember and identify. This is somewhat of a problem because everything is supposed to be random!

Profanity’s algorithm had a weakness in how it was generating random numbers. Profanity used a 32 bit integer (4.3 billion numbers) to seed the making of the address. As a result, this was brute forcable and came to the public eye.

The belief is that keys are used for Wintermute were generating using Profanity and this is how they were compromised. Please only used trusted and audited tools!