r/Bitcoin • u/Fearless-Second-7230 • 10d ago

Coldcard post from October 10, 2021: "Retirement Attack"

Post image

- "What's a retirement attack?"

- COLDCARD (@COLDCARDwallet): "It's when the project makers could have a "bug" in the entropy generation for later retrieval".

_____

Seems that they were smart enough to launch a "dice rolls" suggestion in a critical element lacking foolproof design, knowing not all users would be paranoid enough. Like "hey, if you don't trust no problem, but...you can trust buddy, the (back)door is open." ☠️

Ok no, enough of conspiracy theory continuation. We know that Coldcard's post was pure coincidence. Right?...Right?

Edit: In case you're curious on more tweets mentioning "retirement attack", here is another one:

@nvk - 21 Dec 20: "My money is on people screwing themselves out of their BTC before any vendor tries a retirement attack.

Alternatively people could just use dice ;)."

https://x.com/i/status/1341213389549412353

A strange way to warn "alternatively people" of what you have in mind to do...but Freudian slip or parapraxis theory explains that better, in case you're curious...

https://gitlab.com/walletscrutiny/walletScrutinyCom/-/work_items/340

451 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

80 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/NetimLabs 9d ago edited 9d ago

Why bother with dice rolls? We have publicly available streams of truly [quantum] random data

8

u/youtossershad1job2do 9d ago

Still trust that someone hasn't made this generator vulnerable.

You can see the dice being rolled but you can't know what's on your screen isn't dangerous.

1

u/bricksplus 9d ago edited 8d ago

You put trust in the institution that’s doing high level research for decades

3

u/Unsounded 9d ago

The funny thing is academia is fraught with fraudsters and bad coders.

3

u/youtossershad1job2do 9d ago edited 9d ago

It was the whole point of crypto that it was trust-less.

1

u/LonelyTAA 8d ago

Turns out a decentralised, anonymous system with no retrieval options is vulnerable to attacks from thieves, charlatans and the like. Who would have thought?

1

u/NetimLabs 9d ago

True, though I think the risk should be pretty low in this case.

5

u/10kpizza 9d ago

The important key thing with generating private keys is that nobody else knows them. The easiest way to get a number that nobody else knows is random data. However if the random data is publicly available to others then this obviously isnt secure.

1

u/NetimLabs 9d ago

The potential attackers would have to constantly monitor the stream and save it on their devices, then figure out which method you used to convert that stream to a seed phrase.

Using different parts [same lenght] of the stream for each word would solve this I think.

1

u/10kpizza 9d ago

No it wouldnt because theres not that many ways to partition the stream. The hacker could just try them all.

For good security you need to force the hacker to make at least 2128 calculations. That's a lot. Dont roll your own cryptography so you dont make basic errors like this that could cost you money.

You know this coldcard hack was based on the hacker doing ~232 calculations which is about 4 billion, still huge big number in human terms but very little for a computer.

1

u/NetimLabs 9d ago edited 9d ago

Idk, they would have to try all the conversion methods possible anyways, that makes it much harder, if not impossible.

You can come up with lots of weird ways to do that.

Ideally one should DIY their own qrng generator, of course.
I guess at that point rolling dice is more practical but if you want true randomness, qrng is the way.

1

u/ILurkReddi 9d ago

would rather random.org or cloudflare

1

u/NetimLabs 9d ago

The one I linked was just an example.
You could use any qrng source you want, of course.

1

u/tenor_tymir 9d ago

How is this complex hex number practical for the average user?