In a recent press release issued by Treadwell Stanton DuPont, the claim is made that their research laboratories have successfully broken all 64 rounds of the SHA256 hashing algorithm. They further claim that they achieved this milestone a year ago (late 2018).


  "While we have successfully broken all 64 rounds of pre-image
  resistance," said Seiijiro Takamoto, Treadwell Stanton DuPont's
  director of newly formed Hardware Engineering Division, "it is not our
  intention to bring down Bitcoin, break SSL/TLS security or crack any
  financial sector security whatsoever."


How credible is this claim in the wider cryptographic community?

[Update, 2019-09-12: Upon being exposed, and/or after taking advantage of market manipulation by their fraudulent announcements, the scam artists of Treadwell Stanton DuPont have retracted their claim, with more meaningless waffling technobabble about ‘laboratory equipment flaws’ and ‘ambiguous results’—yet they are still selling the same snake oil!  I leave the commentary below as a record of their fraud, including magic market prediction oracles they continue to hawk as well.]

[Update, 2019-09-18: Now the scam artists of Treadwell Stanton DuPont are just straight up asking for donations, perhaps because the world pointed out they don't actually have anything to sell but they still want to take your money and haven't found a productive way to contribute to society in exchange for it.]




  How credible is this claim in the wider cryptographic community?


It is balderdash by scam artists trying to bamboozle people into buying fintech snake oil, using meaningless technobabble (plus quantum!), a virtual office address on Wall Street, and a slick-looking web site with sleek gadget photos and impossible claims about market prediction.

There is no merit to this claim.  If they actually had this capacity, they could easily demonstrate it by showing a SHA-256 collision, or a message whose SHA-256 hash is all bits zero.  Since they are running an elaborate fraud, rather than doing cryptography, obviously they cannot do this.  But for fun, and to make an indelible record on the web for the chumps who at least have the good sense to search the company's name, let's take a look at these scam artists.



From the press release, archived in case anyone tries to memory-hole it to evade prosecution for fraud.


  "While we have successfully broken all 64 rounds of pre-image resistance," said Seiijiro Takamoto, Treadwell Stanton DuPont's director of newly formed Hardware Engineering Division, "it is not our intention to bring down Bitcoin, break SSL/TLS security or crack any financial sector security whatsoever."


Seiijiro Takamoto does not appear to exist on the web outside the fraudulent press release issued by ‘Treadwell Stanton DuPont’.


  Up to now, it was thought impossible to use the output of the hash function to reconstruct its given input.


They don't seem to be clear on what a preimage attack does.  (If the input is longer than the output, what a preimage attack finds is almost certainly not the original input but another one with the same output.)


  In accordance with its disclosure policy, Treadwell Stanton DuPont won't be saying exactly how they did it — because once the proof-of-concept is out, anyone with enough computing power will be able to produce a SHA-256 collision, rendering the algorithm both insecure and obsolete.


They can't keep their story straight about whether it's a preimage attack or a collision attack.



From their web site, archived:


  While the exploit won’t be detailed here, it does take quite some computing power to achieve, overlapping into the quantum computing realm. So much, in fact, that combinatorial optimization is used, along with a fully connected/coupled 32,768-bit scale, 256-bit gradation solution space, which translates to a maximum of 1.158x1077 gradations of large-scale, precision parallel processing.


wat


  Remember: this is not brute force.


False.  This is a brute force assault on hapless victims by a barrage of technobabble.


  It is not our intention to bring down Bitcoin, which is why only 25 PHAEDRA A3497 and 25 PHAEDRA A3487 Compute Nodes will ever be constructed. Even though preliminary design, manufacturing specification and initial construction work has already begun, it will likely be 12 months before the first compute nodes are delivered to clients, worldwide.


The fraudsters are creating the illusion of scarcity to scare chumps into giving them money as soon as possible, and setting a deadline that gives them plenty of time to walk off with the money and find another scam.


  PHAEDRA A3497 will start shipping around mid-October 2020 at a rate of one per week. PHAEDRA A3487 will follow suit starting around mid-November 2020. Shipped on a first come, first served basis (S&H not included), if you have secured a place amongst any of the two lists (10 BTC and 6 BTC respectively), you can still climb to a higher rank by submitting or resubmitting an accumulative higher bid.


It's first-come-first-served, except if you pay more you can skip the queue!  But you have to pay in BTC, it seems.  I'm sure this is for principled reasons about evil central payment processors like ‘Visa’ who could be capriciously subverted by the judicial overreach of a court order about fraud, and certainly not because BTC transactions are irreversible.


  Timeline:
  
  
  Founding.  Treadwell Stanton DuPont is created to research and develop stock market prediction algorithms using artificial intelligence neural networks.
  


Curious that they waited until 2017 to register their domain name, nine years after their scam was founded.



Their main web page, amazingly, manages to be worse:


  There's only one proven method to beat the stock market: accurate, precise and timely world-class stocks and securities forecasting. It's like having an oracle at your beck and call. Like clockwork, know what's going to happen beforehand, every single time and take the guesswork —and risk— out of wise stock market investing.


In principle there could be a cryptanalytic attack on SHA-256, but the market will be deterministically predictable only when birds like me hang out with airborne pigs.

Here's another product with their name on it, the NEBULA6 SSE Stock and Securities Forecasting Neural Net platform, sold—as a 100 USD brochure—on eBay:


  If you're a sophisticated investor, hear this: Even your initial investment appreciates over time! Treadwell Stanton DuPont accounts are scarce and highly sought-after, and only a few dozens are available (it's free to register). Their value will SKYROCKET in the next, upcoming months, with many standing in-line for a chance to grab an account. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOOSE! This is a NO-RISK, ZERO LOSS, FAIL-SAFE, FOOL-PROOF investment! EASY TO USE: Even a total newbie who knows next to nothing of the stock market can get up and running in LESS THAN 15 minutes! TSD does not sell securities - they offer extremely accurate stock forecast charts with a degree of precision previously unheard-of, that has until now been the domain of some of the biggest and most established financial players (aka large investment banks).


I'm ready to line up outside their virtual office at 30 Wall Street which is so exclusive anyone on the web can rent it and make my millions!

Maybe they broke into the cryptobabble fintech space because the sketchball eBay fintech predictimacator market was too smart and got wise to them too fast.
