Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Private Key by 256 coin flips
by
odolvlobo
on 24/10/2019, 20:23:23 UTC
Casino grade dice are the only dice that should be used. ...
If feel like that is major overkill. Randomness is not the primary goal.

In a brute force attack, the attacker uses their knowledge of any biases to reduce the search space. A purely random number has no biases, so it is an effective tool. But, it is not a necessary condition since a lack of randomness does not necessarily give the attacker any information.

Suppose, I have a hardware random number generator that tends to set some bits to 1 and some other bits to 0. If the attacker does not know which bits are biased and what their biases are, they have no information that will help them.

You can say that flipping a coin is not truly random, but it is effectively random to the attacker unless they know the exact conditions that were present when the coin was flipped.

Suppose I take 256 coins and set a number of of them to heads and the rest to tails, and then I arrange them in a certain order. Assuming that the number of heads vs. tails and the order of the coins makes no difference to me (i.e., I have no obvious biases), the result is effectively random to the attacker even though it is not random at all.