Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by carterschonwald 1991 days ago
Since the only proof of owner ship is private key material. Yes. And in fact this has been done and demonstrated for certain ethereum or other systems.

edit: certain elliptical curve crypto systems use randomness as part of the encipherment process. If two uses of the same key have low quality randomness/no randomness, solving for the private key material essentially becomes a slightly tedious high school algebra math problem.

heres a paper from last year where they did such an analysis, found some weak keys, and then saw that those wallets had already been hacked/drained! (possibly by someone who did similar work, for profit rather than science) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023