3 ms·
As sowbug and tptacek mention, there are no common-factor attacks against Bitcoin keys. However, that doesn't mean that the PRNGs used in cryptocurrency impleme
by schoen 8y ago
As sowbug and tptacek mention, there are no common-factor attacks against Bitcoin keys. However, that doesn't mean that the PRNGs used in cryptocurrency implementations aren't a concern. The most famous incident was probably this
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-April/015873.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018...
(you can find subsequent journalism about the effects of this if you're interested).
There have also been other cryptocurrency PRNG attacks that weren't as high-profile as this issue.
- tptacek 8y agoJava SecureRandom: a userland CSPRNG!
- pvg 8y agoThis is JS. The (current-ish) Java ones use the OS-provided facility.
- schoen 8y agoI wish I had remembered the "Biased Nonce Sense" paper (which I heard about last week but didn't read!), which someone else mentions downthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18917385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18917385 https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023.pdf (This is a nonce reuse issue rather than a common-factor vulnerability, but one reason for nonce reuse can also be CSPRNG seeding problems.)