English

How Perfect Offline Wallets Can Still Leak Bitcoin Private Keys

Cryptography and Security 2015-01-05 v1

Abstract

ECDSA has become a popular choice as lightweight alternative to RSA and classic DL based signature algorithms in recent years. As standardized, the signature produced by ECDSA for a pair of a message and a key is not deterministic. This work shows how this non-deterministic choice can be exploited by an attacker to leak private information through the signature without any side channels, an attack first discovered by Young and Yung for classic DL-based cryptosystems in 1997, and how this attack affects the application of ECDSA in the Bitcoin protocol.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.00447,
  title  = {How Perfect Offline Wallets Can Still Leak Bitcoin Private Keys},
  author = {Stephan Verbücheln},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.00447},
  year   = {2015}
}