alt Hacker NewsIt feels like they chose the private keys by hand.
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My bet is on one of
- A sequence number being accidentally used as the private key or
- The private key being generated securely but then accidentally truncated to 8 bits (e.g. writing a single char into a zeroed buffer when you should've memcpy'd from a char*).
The sequence number idea is supported by the fact that two of the G3B private keys are consecutive numbers. I ran a quick Monte Carlo simulation and if I got it right, sampling 8 keys from [0,255] uniformly at random (as in the truncation scenario), you'd expect them to contain 2 consecutive numbers only about 18% of the time.
There's a beginning of an explanation in the mozilla bugrepor thttps://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449
A long time ago one time pads used to be chosen by hand by women picking numbered lottery balls out of a spherical tumbling machine on a table.
The fact that there are more than the "4" one, and all the low numbers are below 384 (384 being the bits for private key) makes me think whoever was creating these thought "Oh a random number between 1-384" let me choose... 4! (156, 230, 115, 56, 66, 237, 155)...
Artisanal cryptography. Hand-picked private keys salted with organically sourced nonces.