brute-force: A library for brute forcing arbitrary computations in Rust

This is a library meant to take care of the repetitive tasks of spinning up threads, checking if the computation is finished, returning the result, and even generating the inputs. The adaptor system allows you to compose different helpers in a modular way, as not all brute forcing is as simple as proof of work. The common assumption of this library is that each thread will be working off a state to be the first to find a result, and the computation will end once a result is found.

Simple example

use brute_force::{brute_force, adaptors};
use blake2::{Blake2b, Digest};

#[test]
fn test_proof_of_work() {
    let config = brute_force::Config::default();
    let f = |nonce: &u64| {
        let digest = Blake2b::digest(&nonce.to_le_bytes());
        digest.as_slice()[..3] == [0; 3]
    };
    let nonce = brute_force(config, adaptors::output_input(adaptors::auto_advance(f)));
    let digest = Blake2b::digest(&nonce.to_le_bytes());
    assert!(digest.as_slice()[..3] == [0; 3])
}

Here, we use the auto_advance adaptor to automatically generate nonces for us, and we use the output_input adaptor to automatically return the input nonce used if a computation succeeds (instead of manually specifying the output).

For more examples, see the src/tests directory. For documentation on the config and adaptors, see the docs.

Configuration

You can change the number of threads used with the environment variable BRUTE_FORCE_THREADS.

Inside the program, via the Config struct, you can manually override the thread count or change how often this library checks if a thread should stop. You can also set a timeout via the brute_force_with_timeout function.