Is it possible to brute force bitcoin address creation in order to steal money?

It is possible to brute force some Bitcoin addresses, because some people generate their private keys in an insecure manner using “deterministic wallets”. A deterministic wallet is a system of deriving keys from a single starting point known as a seed. The seed allows a user to easily back up and restore a wallet without needing any other information and can in some cases allow the creation of public addresses without the knowledge of the private key. Any (non-zero) 32 bytes can be a private key. So running sha256 over a passphrase gives an apparently random, but brute force-able private key.

Take sha256(“sausage”) for instance:

$ echo -n 'sausage' | sha256sum
30caae2fcb7c34ecadfddc45e0a27e9103bd7cfc87730d7818cc096b1266a683  -

Load up bitaddress and paste that private key into the ‘wallet details’ tab to get the corresponding Bitcoin address, then look it up on blockexplorer:

$ GET http://blockexplorer.com/q/getreceivedbyaddress/1TnnhMEgic5g4ttrCQyDopwqTs4hheuNZ; echo
0.01000000

and you’ll see that the address held one bitcent for about 2 days in February 2012.

In reality, Bitcoin addresses are actually the 256-bit SHA hash of an ECDSA public key, so any vulnerabilities in those algorithms would constitute a vulnerability in bitcoin itself. Realistically, however, breaking this level of encryption requires a huge amount of processing power. Coincidentally it requires precisely the same kind of processing power that bitcoin mining requires and in almost every scenario it would be massively more profitable to mine than to hack.