Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Off-chain anonymous transactions by secure transfer of private keys
by
drazvan
on 25/05/2015, 16:08:57 UTC
OK, did read a little further to see that you reassure the reader that you are on the up and up.
How will you prove that the smartcard is not generating random-looking private keys which in fact are not random but have some deterministic element?

The OtherCoin Android application will be open source, it's just the part that runs on the secure microSD card that will be closed. The Android app generates its own random key that is _added_ to the one the smartcard generates and you can verify the Android app to ensure that the key is really random. So, even if the smartcard generates the most deterministic key (let's say it always generates 0 as its random key), you always add a random value of your own (generated by the Android app) to it. The result is obviously random (random + deterministic = random).

This is very similar to how vanity Bitcoin address generators work (see https://vanitypool.appspot.com/faq for instance). Also check out point #3 in the  "What it doesn't do" section of the whitepaper.