Keybase

Who this is

Keybase built key management for people, then encrypted chat, then got bought by Zoom in May 2020. Before all that, in November 2013, it published WarpWallet: a brainwallet that runs scrypt and PBKDF2 over a passphrase and a salt, so a plain wordlist attack doesn't work. To prove it, they funded six challenges with short passphrases and told everyone the shape of each one. Four small ones fell. The two 20 BTC ones expired and Keybase published the answers when it took the coins back.

The two Twitter profiles on the record are the founders, Max Krohn and Chris Coyne, because the WarpWallet page was theirs before there was a company to speak of.

What the record says

The WarpWallet page, which still lists the challenges and their hints. The repository, where the signed releases and the challenge history live. And the blog post about Zoom, which is the company's own account of what happened to it. The date on that fact is the announcement date.

The record

static readonly author = party("Keybase", {
  key: "keybase",
  kind: PartyKind.Organization,
  about: "The identity and encryption company that published WarpWallet in 2013 and paid to have its own brainwallets cracked. Part of Zoom since 2020.",
  profiles: [
    profile("website", "https://keybase.io/warp"),
    profile("github", "https://github.com/keybase/warpwallet"),
    profile("twitter", "https://twitter.com/maxtaco"),
    profile("twitter", "https://twitter.com/malgorithms"),
  ],
  facts: [
    fact("WarpWallet derives a key from scrypt and PBKDF2 over a passphrase and a salt, …", "https://keybase.io/warp", { date: "2013-11-19" }),
    fact("The code, the signed releases and the challenge history live in the keybase/warpwallet repository.", "https://github.com/keybase/warpwallet"),
    fact("Zoom acquired Keybase. …", "https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom", { date: "2020-05-07" }),
  ],
});