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Topic
Board Project Development
Re: Are dices for generating seed words fair?
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 26/10/2022, 14:52:23 UTC
What do you think makes this a non-trivial problem exactly? A deck of cards has 225 real bits of entropy. No more no less. They should be able to be used directly as is. Now you ask me about my method. I don't have a method yet.
The fact that we don't have a good method makes it a problem. The only implementation of cards to seed phrase I am aware of is Ian Coleman's, which as we have already discussed here is not great. I am not aware of any other implementation, and I'm certainly not going to propose one. They obviously can't be used "as is" since a seed phrase or a private key needs to be presented in bits, and a string of cards is not in bits nor directly convertible to bits without applying some kind of transformation.

This gets us back to the original discussion regarding converting a string of dice rolls in to a string of bits, which as I argued before, should not just be a case of applying a hash function and assuming you now have a cryptographically secure random number and you are perfectly safe.

So again, I would say that if you don't trust /dev/urandom for some reason, then stick to flipping a coin to produce a string of bits directly. Anything else is more complicated, more time consuming, and potentially less secure.