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muvlon • today at 10:43 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

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.


Replies

account42 • today at 11:02 AM

All the numbers also have digits going from left to right on a keyboard. I think the manual "random" input theory is plausible.

➕ show 2 replies
Avamander • today at 11:11 AM

Some error code being used? FIPS mode gone wrong?