Bitcoin vulnerability

[Holliday]

[coinpharmer]

there have been some good posts in this thread, and some of the best have been deleted, but it seems to me the only way for this problem to even exist is to use a program that does not generate the hash from a actually random set of variables. if something as silly as a time stamp is used as a seed thats dumb as fuck. I seem to remember mine being generated by filling a huge box with text at random by bashing my keyboard followed by having a moving my mouse all over the screen. that compared to a timestamp that can be guessed by a hacker within 2 hours doesnt even seem like a flaw in bitcoin, more of a flaw in the wallet design a few people choose to use.... nothing to see here...    correct me if im wrong tho please,

[piramida]

there have been some good posts in this thread, and some of the best have been deleted, but it seems to me the only way for this problem to even exist is to use a program that does not generate the hash from a actually random set of variables. if something as silly as a time stamp is used as a seed thats dumb as fuck. I seem to remember mine being generated by filling a huge box with text at random by bashing my keyboard followed by having a moving my mouse all over the screen. that compared to a timestamp that can be guessed by a hacker within 2 hours doesnt even seem like a flaw in bitcoin, more of a flaw in the wallet design a few people choose to use.... nothing to see here...    correct me if im wrong tho please,

No, that's exactly what it going on. i.e., if you publish your private key on the web, or describe how you generated your private key, there's not much difference. True that there is alot of different software generating PKs nowadays, this could be a good test to find weaklings.

[sickpig]

in this  thread gmaxwell set a bounty of 50 BTC for Evil-Knievel, or anybody else interested, in case
they will be able to provide the discrete log of at least one of a set of 200K randomly generated
secp256k1 public keys.


if you're interested in understanding why this is not a "vulnerability" just read further the
aformentioned thread.

 

[piramida]

they'd have better luck taking a dictionary and trying automatically picking brain wallet combos; took me all of 15 seconds manually to find a funded one. never underestimate the power of math and human stupidity owner of 16QApoZYFdZzhETsNwvJNdfvKpAukTxzs9 PM me with passphrase you used and promise to never ever make brain wallets and I'll send 0.7 mBTC back just because we think alike.

[MonkeeRench]

In fact I believe the NSA compromised a standard method on random number generation so that it would produce predictable results and allow them to take advantage of that

Bruce Schneier has long written that the probability is unacceptably high that the NSA has installed a PRNG backdoor in the widely accepted SHA-3 standard protocol for cryptography (which NIST grudgingly accepted only with a footnoted caveat that one might prefer to use a more efficient alternative).  If such a backdoor exists (which seems nearly certain to me), the NSA can rather easily crack into any level it chooses of such encryption, and that means virtually all the BTC and altcoin protocols - which would be the rather instant death of such cryptocurrencies.  Is Quarkcoin the only alternative cryptocoin that claims it does not use the tainted PNRG?

[MonkeeRench]

...[an incredibly beautiful jpg]...

...unless that is, in 2005 the NSA installed a PRNG backdoor in the AES-256 SHA-3 "NIST-approved" protocol for encryption, as Bruce Schneier et al. have shown long ago is highly probable.

[knightcoin]

pit pat piffy wing wong wang 

[raid_n]

...[an incredibly beautiful jpg]...

...unless that is, in 2005 the NSA installed a PRNG backdoor in the AES-256 SHA-3 "NIST-approved" protocol for encryption, as Bruce Schneier et al. have shown long ago is highly probable.

Of course you did know that the public/private key algorithm used in bitcoin is ECDSA (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithm)
and this was just a fun fact 

[PirateHatForTea]

...unless that is, in 2005 the NSA installed a PRNG backdoor in the AES-256 SHA-3 "NIST-approved" protocol for encryption, as Bruce Schneier et al. have shown long ago is highly probable.

I do not believe that the NIST changes were suggested by the NSA. Nor do I believe that the changes make the algorithm easier to break by the NSA. I believe NIST made the changes in good faith, and the result is a better security/performance trade-off. My problem with the changes isn't cryptographic, it's perceptual. There is so little trust in the NSA right now, and that mistrust is reflecting on NIST. I worry that the changed algorithm won't be accepted by an understandably skeptical security community, and that no one will use SHA-3 as a result.

So Schneier explicitly says he DOESN'T think there's a backdoor in SHA-3. WTF you talking about.

What's more, a SHA exploit does not allow anyone to steal coins, it only affects mining. ECDSA is what protects transaction signing and thus the coins. AND even if that were broken you still couldn't steal coins from addresses which had never been spent from, because you don't know the public key.

[MonkeeRench]

...unless that is, in 2005 the NSA installed a PRNG backdoor in the AES-256 SHA-3 "NIST-approved" protocol for encryption, as Bruce Schneier et al. have shown long ago is highly probable.

I do not believe that the NIST changes were suggested by the NSA. Nor do I believe that the changes make the algorithm easier to break by the NSA. I believe NIST made the changes in good faith, and the result is a better security/performance trade-off. My problem with the changes isn't cryptographic, it's perceptual. There is so little trust in the NSA right now, and that mistrust is reflecting on NIST. I worry that the changed algorithm won't be accepted by an understandably skeptical security community, and that no one will use SHA-3 as a result.

So Schneier explicitly says he DOESN'T think there's a backdoor in SHA-3. WTF you talking about.

No, Schneier here was referring to the more recent NIST fumbling with the arguably inappropriate changes of the "winning" Keccak hash variation, not a backdoor.  Schneier's far more serious concern has long been that expressed in "Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?" by Bruce Schneier, 
Wired News, 
November 15, 2007:

"But one of those [NSA PNRG] generators -- the one based on elliptic curves -- is not like the others. Called Dual_EC_DRBG, not only is it a mouthful to say, it's also three orders of magnitude slower than its peers. It's in the standard only because it's been championed by the NSA, which first proposed it years ago in a related standardization project at the American National Standards Institute.

The NSA has always been intimately involved in U.S. cryptography standards -- it is, after all, expert in making and breaking secret codes. So the agency's participation in the NIST (the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology) standard is not sinister in itself. It's only when you look under the hood at the NSA's contribution that questions arise.

Problems with Dual_EC_DRBG were first described in early 2006. The math is complicated, but the general point is that the random numbers it produces have a small bias. The problem isn't large enough to make the algorithm unusable -- and Appendix E of the NIST standard describes an optional work-around to avoid the issue -- but it's cause for concern. Cryptographers are a conservative bunch: We don't like to use algorithms that have even a whiff of a problem.

But today there's an even bigger stink brewing around Dual_EC_DRBG. In an informal presentation (.pdf) at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor."
 
If Schneier et al. have ever changed their view on the PRNG Backdoor or expressed regret on their somewhat hedged probabilistic/weakness interpretations, I've never seen it in print and would appreciate any citation of such.

As Schneier has said, only a new Church Committee will ever reveal convincing truth and reform, and until such time it seems only fools use AES-256 without an open, proven, fully disclosed PRNG alternative to Dual_EC_DRBG (e.g.Twofish) and that it's possibly risky to use the NIST-Keccak hash variation rather than a similarly reliable hash, e.g. SKEIN.

[raid_n]

Sorry but your posts scream FUD all over the place.

A vulnerability in the way random numbers are generated does not mean that ECDSA itself is broken and if you can understand the papers you are referencing then you know this.

As PirateHatForTea states this is virtually a non-issue because any wallet software that generates private keys without additional randomness through mouse movements, dice,garbage keyboard hits or any other external source is, quite frankly, shit and should not be used.

In terms of mining this vulnerability also makes no sense at all. Being able to narrow down the range of the input so you can try to guess and break the hash does not mean you can alter the number range of the output hash.
There would only be a problem in mining if you could break the numeric distribution of hashes in a way that reliably produced hashes in the target difficulty range.

[MonkeeRench]

You've responded to NONE of the points made by Schneier et al. and have disingenuously brought up straw dogs that have never been mentioned. FAIL, re-enroll logic class.

Bye.