Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Deterministic Usage of DSA and ECDSA Digital Signature Algorithms (RFC 6979)
by
Crowex
on 10/09/2013, 09:32:15 UTC
This is all well and good - yes it works just fine. However as I understand it, it spoils the benefits of having a 3rd party entity be able to *exactly* reproduce your signatures to verify that your HW device is not doing anything dumb when generating said signatures. This gives them confidence that your HW wallet is not leaking information about private keys through sub-par 'random' number generation.

What would be the disadvantage of deterministically generating k each time and then multiplying by a PRNG generated number and reducing mod n and use this to sign?
Wouldn't you get protection against the failure of either method this way?

Ok. I was seeing it as insurance against faulty PRNGs. Hardware wallets are always going to have a problem in ensuring the private keys are generated ok anyway.
 But if you did want to check the signing nonce would it be possible to pre-generate a file of random numbers, store them on the wallet and give them to the purchaser of the wallet in a file or online, then deterministically generate the number and add the next number from the random number file and reduce mod n and sign with this?