4 ms·

this could be a big blow to Bitcoin adoption... Is this a part of Android that can't be touched by anyone but Gooogle? Or is it a piece of software that can be

• nwh 13y ago
  They can use /dev/random if they so choose.
• javert 13y ago
  I don't think it's a very big deal. For the most part, people who use bitcoin now are still very early adopters and are techies. Also, IMHO, it would be idiotic to have significant bitcoin value stored on an Android phone, and very few people (if anyone) would do that.
  • Buge 13y ago
    People are saying it's a problem with Android's SecureRandom implementation. That would be a pretty big problem if it returns repeated random numbers. But it seems strange that such a large obvious problem would make it into Android. The other explanation is that Android bitcoin developers are all implementing it incorrectly and either don't realize it or are trying to push the blame somewhere else.
    • jadeddrag 13y ago
      It is very likely that the bitcoin community would be the first to stumble onto a crypto bug in SecureRandom. Google should thank that community for their discovery.
      • makomk 13y ago
        Extremely likely, in this case. It looks like the way it was discovered is that various people have set up bots to take Bitcoins from transactions with repeated r values, and they took coins from Android Bitcoin clients that on paper were doing everything right.
    • w0rd-driven 13y ago
      This is the most likely scenario. While I don't know Java technically, .NET has a similar "vulnerability" if you use more than one RNG. It uses time to seed new values and the general rule is you use this as a singleton/static app-wide. If you don't do this, all your rng's share the exact same value. It's really awkward to stumble into as all the evidence points to the framework but when you rtfm you realize no, its really pebkac. I'm not saying this can't be a vulnerability in the framework, just this is the most likely scenario.
      • Dylan16807 13y ago
        A secure random number generator wouldn't seed based on time in the first place, though.
        • brazzy 13y ago
          Even Java's non-secure RNG doesn't do that (anymore): public Random() { this(++seedUniquifier + System.nanoTime()); }
  • vbuterin 13y ago
    > Also, IMHO, it would be idiotic to have significant bitcoin value stored on an Android phone, and very few people (if anyone) would do that. Correct. The standard recommendation is to store significant savings in wallets that you use as little as possible (ideally offline).
• drivebyacct2 13y ago
  Not really, storing a wallet on a general use device like a smartphone seems like a colossally bad idea.