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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Here is a linkedin-free writeup. Low entropy key generation is an oldie but a goodie -- I recall when ssh keys generated with Debian had this problem.

For this particular story, I think that the morale is that rather than worrying about increasingly far-fetched modes of attack ("yes, you can keep your key on an airgapped encrypted OpenBSD laptop, but what if someone steals that laptop and manages to brute force the passphrase, would you not prefer some hardware encryption where the chip clears itself after three wrong passphrase entries?"), you should worry about "what if my niche crypto implementation is not as secure as anticipated?"

Also, if you make hardware wallets, auditing that the crypto is implemented correctly seems to be (not to put too fine a point to it) THE ONE JOB YOU HAD? Most failing cryptography fails not because the math is unsound, nor because someone has a quantum computer with sufficient memory, but simply because implementations are hard and people write buggy code. I know enough about crypto to not try to roll out my own implementations. "Key generated from low entropy PRNG" is a failure mode we had before. I recall Truecrypt simply prompting you to type a lot of noise simply because they did not wholly trust their supposed hardware randomness sources.

The #ifndef vs #if thing is likewise fun -- sure, usually it is not that harmful.

I will go out on a limb and say that this seems exactly the kind of bug an enterprising cybercriminal would discover with the help of an unfettered LLM these days. Being a hardware wallet where all the paranoid people park their coins makes it a juicy target, of course.

you should worry about "what if my niche crypto implementation is not as secure as anticipated?"

Or in this case, "What if the person writing it is a blind idiot monkey?"

Getting true random noise is trivially easy in microcontrollers and only a complete idiot would use something like micropython in such security critical application.

Key generated from low entropy PRNG" is a failure mode we had before.

The rather infamous Debian SSH key generation vulnerability was like this, and was way back in 2008. Ironically, that one was introduced by following the guidance of an automated security checking tool, and impacted Debian and related distributions.

Someone did point out this vulnerability was discovered shortly after one frontier model or another was released. But then again, there are new models every day, so who knows.

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