Hacking Series Part 19

Challenge: Holiday Hack Objective 11a

Category: pwn?? blockchain??

We are given a part of a blockchain and told to predict the nonce of block 130000. Since every block prior to the 130000th has a nonce, we can use the pseudo-randomness of these numbers to predict the future ones. With the PRNG predictor Python module (mersenne-twister-predictor or mt19937predictor), you can do this easily for both 32 and 64 bit numbers.

Using predictor.setrandbits() you can insert previous nonce values and the type of integer to…