Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
Richy_T
on 30/12/2014, 15:07:27 UTC

The issue with poor PSRNGs has noting to do with address generation, the only way poor randomness could be exploited with addresses is if you could reproduce the poor randomness yourself.

The issue is that poor PSRNGs conceivably could reuse or have insufficient entropy in "R" values in signing transactions, which allows an attacker looking at the transactions either in the blockchain or mempool to reverse ECDSA. This scenario is the real attack, because it doesn't necessarily require anything other than an understanding of the elliptic curve mathematics and scanning through transactions until you find a vulnerable public key.

This "Hash Hyena" is making the ridiculous claim that running vanitygen plus having a very large hard drive equals some kind of production of a collision database that produces non-trivial amounts of hits. That has no relevance to the issue of poor randomness, but I guess it sure sounds like it does!

The only thing here more ridiculous than Hash Hyena's claim about address security, is that pedantic P(security broken) formula, which at this point might as well be a laxative.

You are right, of course. Slipped my mind that that is what the issue was. I think Jorge knows it too since he has posted links to the actual issue before though. Address generation *could* be an issue but is somewhat less likely.