OrangeSurf on Nostr: If you can write down 12 words you can enter 99 real dice rolls. That said, tools ...
If you can write down 12 words you can enter 99 real dice rolls.
That said, tools which allow you to enter dice rolls should prevent you from accidentally entering too few rolls and generating an insecure seed.
The instructions are simple.
1. Enter 99 real dice rolls.
2. Optional: First enter 99 dice rolls on the signing device AND a tool like BitcoinQ_A's seed tool to check they match. IF they do match, RESET the signing device and enter 99 NEW dice rolls ONLY on the signing device (and NOT on any other device).
If you do the optional step of verifying you can sleep well at night without wondering whether the device random number generation was random, without needing to verify both the firmware and the hardware.
What about Coldcard, I read that users lost funds?
Although Coldcard is not FOSS you can view the source code to see exactly what the bug was and how it was fixed.
There was a warning since the dice rolls feature was added in 2019, but users could (and did) override this. https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware/blame/5527d5b399c4056089ab97363e71aaaa4ae53ae6/shared/seed.py#L343
An Enforcement & Distribution Check was added with firmware from v5.1.0, 2023-02-27 which is available only for the MK4 https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware/commit/2bbe27fa52e940bfef2a0a42b290c23e2d93b6db
This is not a hypothetical problem. Here is a very unfortunate example of a user who made the error of ignoring the warning screen, which resulted in lost bitcoin. IMO fixes like this should be included in firmware updates for old models unless there is a technical limitation which makes this impractical.
That said, tools which allow you to enter dice rolls should prevent you from accidentally entering too few rolls and generating an insecure seed.
The instructions are simple.
1. Enter 99 real dice rolls.
2. Optional: First enter 99 dice rolls on the signing device AND a tool like BitcoinQ_A's seed tool to check they match. IF they do match, RESET the signing device and enter 99 NEW dice rolls ONLY on the signing device (and NOT on any other device).
If you do the optional step of verifying you can sleep well at night without wondering whether the device random number generation was random, without needing to verify both the firmware and the hardware.
What about Coldcard, I read that users lost funds?
Although Coldcard is not FOSS you can view the source code to see exactly what the bug was and how it was fixed.
There was a warning since the dice rolls feature was added in 2019, but users could (and did) override this. https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware/blame/5527d5b399c4056089ab97363e71aaaa4ae53ae6/shared/seed.py#L343
An Enforcement & Distribution Check was added with firmware from v5.1.0, 2023-02-27 which is available only for the MK4 https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware/commit/2bbe27fa52e940bfef2a0a42b290c23e2d93b6db
This is not a hypothetical problem. Here is a very unfortunate example of a user who made the error of ignoring the warning screen, which resulted in lost bitcoin. IMO fixes like this should be included in firmware updates for old models unless there is a technical limitation which makes this impractical.