Quote from: kjj on April 30, 2013, 06:49:28 PM

In practice, it comes down to paranoia. I side with paranoia in theory, but with reality in practice. As in, I prefer my keys to come from sources as close as possible to actually being genuine entropy sources. But those suck, so I use RDRAND, EGD, and other sources of high quality pseudo-entropy. On an offline box, the difference should be negligible.

First, thanks for a very informative post.

Now, I want to veer off topic just slightly.

From my point of view, when generating offline wallets, the entire system you use is the trusted computing base. So I wanted to minimize downloading third-party software besides (in my case) a linux distro and bitcoin-qt. Which is already, in my opinion, a very large and not-that-trusted "trusted" computing base. In any given distro, there are thousands of packages, so thousands of upstream projects, and tens to hundreds of package maintainers.

Shouldn't we be worried about this? If not now, perhaps in the future? Couldn't, say, a governmental entity invest the resources needed to compromise this kind of system? Then, they could introduce a bug similar to the following real one posted on the EGD site, for example:

Quote from: http://egd.sourceforge.net/

egd-0.6 had a major security problem that caused it to only use a tiny fraction of the entropy it gathered. All users should upgrade immediately.

Besides messing with key generation, they could also potentially attack Armory (both on the offline and online clients) to pass information between them. Or they could modify cp such that if you're trying to copy one of several offline wallets to a USB drive, all of them are copied covertly (and then exposed by a malicious cp on the online system).

I'm posting this here because it's in the same vein of paranoia as the rest of this discussion, plus I already have the attention of some smart people and the non-attention of trolls, but perhaps a new thread would be preferable if people have much to say on this besides, "you're crazy" or "go take a look at this prior thread elsewhere".