On Twitter, there is some AI-generated misinformation going around about the safety of dice-generated seeds.
Only in the following cases are your seeds NOT SAFE:
🚨 You generated your seed with the Coldcard.
🚨 You used the Password Generator to generate a passphrase, along with a CC-seed.
In the following cases, your funds are SAFE, but you need caution:
⚠️ SeedXOR: If you used the TRNG option, only one of your shards may be enough to recover the seed. However, they must find the specific shard.
⚠️ MicroSD 2FA: The passphrase stored on the SD card can be decrypted. If you destroy it, you’re fine.
⚠️ Cosign: If you used a CC-generated key, the co-sign can be bypassed + your privacy gone. Otherwise, 0 risk.
⚠️ Password generator: Passwords generated by it are not safe. Rotate them, but this has no impact on your funds.
In the following cases, your funds are SAFE:
✅ HSM mode: The weak RNG was used, but does not have any impact on fund safety.
✅ Key Teleport: The weak RNG-generated password was used on top of ECDH, which nullifies risks.
✅ Dice generation: This uses a standard algorithm.
Replies (23)
Simplify life
Is my understanding correct one the following wrt coldcards:
1 - a wallet with a good passphrase added makes you safe
2 - sufficient dice rolls, even with slightly biased dice (lol?) makes you safe
1. About as secure as the passphrase. So, somewhat harder than a brain wallet to crack. (Unless you used truly random words)
2. Yes. You can just add more rolls anyway
Re:dice, my understanding is it sha256s them, so it really serves as a random seed for that algo, hence bias not too big a deal if you roll plenty (saw peter Todd post something on c along these lines)
thank you for putting this list together
totally fucked situation
is it correct that the claim is the issue was with MicroPython not CC code itself?
if so, do we know if other projects that use that have been affected?
Oh, and using device-generated on device pre-03/2021 is safe, is my understanding as well
Just trying to keep it simple and accurate when I share
I wouldn’t rely on it
What if dice roll down on the Coldcard?
No relevance to human health, focus on whole animal foods for optimal well-being.
Should be fine as it uses a standard algorithm
Has this been 10000% confirmed?
Is Dice input into coldcard + 2/3 multisig (Coldcard only) safe?
😟😟
Do you know, if the seed itself is fine, is there any risk on signing a transaction with a coldcard using the old firmware? I'm beyond paranoid with this thing atm.
Yes because that's how the math works. For the victims, who relied only on the hardware itself—which was coded idiotically and had an obvious bug in it—Coldcard never generated generated a truly random seed phrase at all. What they got was marginally better than inventing your own seed phrase in your head, and with the same predictable end result of someone recreating their easily guessable key.
But the people you're talking about DIYed their own randomization using dice and the BIP word list. This is not the same thing at all; they didn't rely on Coldkite's shitty code.
So my 185 dice rolls will cover it lol?
Can you explain the seedxor thing semisol?
Like, someone uses 100 dice to make a seed, then uses the cold card to seedxor that seed into x parts, now that original seed is fucked because the entropy on the seedxor sucked???
What about generated words + dice rolls on top?
I don't think there's such a thing. If you used dice rolls it does not use the built in random generator at all. It uses a standard algorithm that all the other seed generators use too (the seed words you get are reproducible given the same dice rolls). If you used the dice rolls then used the password generator to make a passphrase you should still be ok as the important part is the seeds and those used the dice rolls as the entropy. But you still may want to change the passphrase and move the funds.
Xor is a standard computational algorithm. I don't think there's any entropy in doing an xor. It's more like doing basic addition and subtraction. Maybe some one else can chime in if I'm wrong about that
No it was coldcards fault how they coded the two together.
ColdCard has two ways to use dice rolls:
1. Generate seed words directly from dice rolls.
2. After generating seed words with their RND, you can add dice rolls to add outside entropy.
Great points!
>SeedXOR safe
Curious here. Isn’t just a normal bip39 secret? What makes SeedXOR special?
Basically, it splits your seed into n parts that need to be XORed together to get the original seed.
The problem is that the “dummy” parts created are all from the insecure PRNG. (Unless you manually created the individual parts and XORed them)
This means that the last part, which is the XOR of the dummy parts and your seed, can be used to fully recover the original seed by itself. (As the possibility of XORed seeds is limited, and they are sequential)
The problem is finding which part it is. You must destroy all of them.
