r/cryptography Apr 01 '26

[Meta] low-effort and anti-slop rules

53 Upvotes

Hello community,

In light of AI and the rise of vibecode, vibeproofs and vibe blogging, the mod team has expanded the "low-effort" rule with more specificity. While an extraordinary tool, AI caused a rise of sloppy content that may be time-consuming to disprove or speculatively break lattice cryptography via theoretical physics or even fully automated karma farming and arguing bots via OpenClaw agents.

Also please feel free to use this post for meta-discussion or suggestions about the sub itself be what you appreciate, what you'd like to see more or less.

The new rules:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs

Posts making cryptographic claims must include substantiated analysis not just speculation or qualitative arguments or be presented as a challenge to the community. Arguments primarily based on non-cryptographic sources are very likely flawed. Posts claiming to break cryptography via non-mathematical means (e.g. theoretical physics) without rigorous mathematical analysis are prohibited. Authors of cryptographic primitives are encouraged to read NIST submissions as example of cryptographic rigor.

No AI-slop

AI-assisted content must be thoroughly reviewed for slop, hallucinations, crackpot cryptography and errors before posting. AI does pattern matching, if the training data contained errors or misunderstandings, they will propagate.   Low effort AI-generated blogpost or code implementations will be removed.


r/cryptography Jan 25 '22

Information and learning resources for cryptography newcomers

333 Upvotes

Please post any sources that you would like to recommend or disclaimers you'd want stickied and if i said something stupid, point it out please.

Basic information for newcomers

There are two important laws in cryptography:

Anyone can make something they don't break. Doesn't make something good. Heavy peer review is needed.

A cryptographic scheme should assume the secrecy of the algorithm to be broken, because it will get out.

 

Another common advice from cryptographers is Don't roll your own cryptography until you know what you are doing. Don't use what you implement or invented without serious peer review. Implementing is fine, using it is very dangerous due to the many pitfalls you will miss if you are not an expert.

 

Cryptography is mainly mathematics, and as such is not as glamorous as films and others might make it seem to be. It is a vast and extremely interesting field but do not confuse it with the romanticized version of medias. Cryptography is not codes. It's mathematical algorithms and schemes that we analyze.

 

Cryptography is not cryptocurrency. This is tiring to us to have to say it again and again, it's two different things.

 

Resources

  • All the quality resources in the comments

  • The wiki page of the r/crypto subreddit has advice on beginning to learn cryptography. Their sidebar has more material to look at.

  • github.com/pFarb: A list of cryptographic papers, articles, tutorials, and how-tos - seems quite complete

  • github.com/sobolevn: A list of cryptographic resources and links -seems quite complete

  • u/dalbuschat 's comment down in the comment section has plenty of recommendations

  • this introduction to ZKP from COSIC, a widely renowned laboratory in cryptography

  • The "Springer encyclopedia of cryptography and security" is quite useful, it's a plentiful encyclopedia. Buy it legally please. Do not find for free on Russian sites.

  • CrypTool 1, 2, JavaCrypTool and CrypTool-Online: this one i did not look how it was

*This blog post details how to read a cryptography paper, but the whole blog is packed with information.

 

Overview of the field

It's just an overview, don't take it as a basis to learn anything, to be honest the two github links from u/treifi seem to do the same but much better so go there instead. But give that one a read i think it might be cool to have an overview of the field as beginners. Cryptography is a vast field. But i'll throw some of what i consider to be important and (more than anything) remember at the moment.

 

A general course of cryptography to present the basics such as historical cryptography, caesar cipher and their cryptanalysis, the enigma machine, stream ciphers, symmetric vs public key cryptography, block ciphers, signatures, hashes, bit security and how it relates to kerckhoff's law, provable security, threat models, Attack models...

Those topics are vital to have the basic understanding of cryptography and as such i would advise to go for courses of universities and sources from laboratories or recognized entities. A lot of persons online claim to know things on cryptography while being absolutely clueless, and a beginner cannot make the difference, so go for material of serious background. I would personally advise mixing English sources and your native language's courses (not sources this time).

With those building blocks one can then go and check how some broader schemes are made, like electronic voting or message applications communications or the very hype blockchain construction, or ZKP or hybrid encryption or...

 

Those were general ideas and can be learnt without much actual mathematical background. But Cryptography above is a sub-field of mathematics, and as such they cannot be avoided. Here are some maths used in cryptography:

  • Finite field theory is very important. Without it you cannot understand how and why RSA works, and it's one of the simplest (public key) schemes out there so failing at understanding it will make the rest seem much hard.

  • Probability. Having a good grasp of it, with at least understanding the birthday paradox is vital.

  • Basic understanding of polynomials.

With this mathematical knowledge you'll be able to look at:

  • Important algorithms like baby step giant step.

  • Shamir secret sharing scheme

  • Multiparty computation

  • Secure computation

  • The actual working gears of previous primitives such as RSA or DES or Merkle–Damgård constructions or many other primitives really.

 

Another must-understand is AES. It requires some mathematical knowledge on the three fields mentioned above. I advise that one should not just see it as a following of shiftrows and mindless operations but ask themselves why it works like that, why are there things called S boxes, what is a SPN and how it relates to AES. Also, hey, they say this particular operation is the equivalent of a certain operation on a binary field, what does it mean, why is it that way...? all that. This is a topic in itself. AES is enormously studied and as such has quite some papers on it.

For example "Peigen – a Platform for Evaluation, Implementation, and Generation of S-boxes" has a good overviews of attacks that S-boxes (perhaps The most important building block of Substitution Permutation Network) protect against. You should notice it is a plentiful paper even just on the presentation of the attacks, it should give a rough idea of much different levels of work/understanding there is to a primitive. I hope it also gives an idea of the number of pitfalls in implementation and creation of ciphers and gives you trust in Schneier's law.

 

Now, there are slightly more advanced cryptography topics:

  • Elliptic curves

  • Double ratchets

  • Lattices and post quantum cryptography in general

  • Side channel attacks (requires non-basic statistical understanding)

For those topics you'll be required to learn about:

  • Polynomials on finite fields more in depth

  • Lattices (duh)

  • Elliptic curve (duh again)

At that level of math you should also be able to dive into fully homomorphic encryption, which is a quite interesting topic.

 

If one wish to become a semi professional cryptographer, aka being involved in the field actively, learning programming languages is quite useful. Low level programming such as C, C++, java, python and so on. Network security is useful too and makes a cryptographer more easily employable. If you want to become more professional, i invite you to look for actual degrees of course.

Something that helps one learn is to, for every topic as soon as they do not understand a word, go back to the prerequisite definitions until they understand it and build up knowledge like that.

I put many technical terms/names of subjects to give starting points. But a general course with at least what i mentioned is really the first step. Most probably, some important topics were forgotten so don't stop to what is mentioned here, dig further.

There are more advanced topics still that i did not mention but they should come naturally to someone who gets that far. (such as isogenies and multivariate polynomial schemes or anything quantum based which requires a good command of algebra)


r/cryptography 21h ago

*Need help* woth multilane bitsliced AEGIS

4 Upvotes

Please don't go too harsh, as I haven't managed to harvest enough info and find a decent elaboration on all of it with AI, articles, etc, so I'm jonesing for one. This is my third time asking this question on different subreddits.

I've been studying the source code of Bitsliced AEGIS on GitHub and I checked the multilane barrel-shift implementations of AEGIS256x2 for both 32 and 64 bits. I stumbled upon the context mask which prevents collisions between lanes and I noticed immediate differences: instead of the common mask described in the AEGIS document of LaneIdx byte + Total lanes byte + zero byte padding up to 16 lane bytes, now I see the following:

  1. It's 256 bytes for X2 lane variant instead of 32

  2. The indexes are weirdly placed rather at the end of the supposed blocks

  3. The indexes themselves are uncommon, being 0x14, they also differ in their values and positions between 32 and 64 bit versions of the mask

In the libaegis library the context mask coefficients are placed in the right order, which matches the documentation, so I don't understand what makes this so different and how we construct one

This is the article about AEGIS I'm referring to: https://cfrg.github.io/draft-irtf-cfrg-aegis-aead/draft-irtf-cfrg-aegis-aead.html#name-the-init-function-4

The GitHub implementation: https://github.com/aegis-aead/aegis-bitsliced

Given the context, how can I construct a mask for e.g. X4, X8 lanes and so on for both 32 and 64 bit barrel shifts?


r/cryptography 1d ago

Is turing award 2012 the most important turing award and the most important work of the last 40 years?

2 Upvotes

This is what allowed the Internet to be secure and to actually scale and be functional, it’s what allowed governments to be secure so basically the entire Internet and every single government and military runs on this. Also it created cryptography as an actual science and defined all of its actual principles so everything from bitcoin to post quantum security completely relies solely on this award.

Also literally all post quantum cryptography, meaning all security for the next few decades completely relies on it. especially as different-hellman and RSA become completely irrelevant

It’s not just important for security it pretty much is security


r/cryptography 2d ago

age-web-gateway: send anonymous end-to-end encrypted messages and files to anyone who published an age public key (self-hostable, MIT)

10 Upvotes

I really like age-encryption, and I wanted an easy way for people to send me messages or files encrypted, without them having to install anything or manage keys. So I wrote age-web-gateway. Like some services in the past, it lets anyone send an anonymous message with the content encrypted in the browser. The recipient side only needs to publish an age public key at a location they control, either a DNS TXT record or an HTTPS .well-known file on their domain.

Maybe someone in this sub finds it interesting.

Go backend, MIT licensed, container image on GHCR, so you can run your own instance and point it at your own SMTP or Cloudflare Email API. Feedback and criticism welcome, especially on the key discovery and trust-level part.

Project: https://github.com/dhcgn/age-web-gateway

Demo: https://age.hdev.io/


r/cryptography 1d ago

Looking for a Technical Advisor

0 Upvotes

OmniMesh is a UK deep-tech cybersecurity company building a secure transport system for Defence, CNI and high-assurance environments.

We’re looking for an experienced applied cryptographer / cryptographic engineer to advise approximately one day per month.

The role is focused on independently challenging our cryptographic architecture, protocol composition, key-management decisions, hybrid post-quantum approach and implementation assumptions as we move towards MVP.

This is an active technical advisory position.

Particularly interested in people with experience in secure protocol design, applied cryptography, PQC, formal analysis or high-assurance communications.

UK-based preferred, although exceptional remote candidates are welcome.

DM if interested.


r/cryptography 1d ago

A new method for factoring arbitrary semiprimes? Weil pairing based factorization

0 Upvotes

I was noticing something: unlike on semiprimes, it s quite easy to generate a point of known small order on a curve defined on a semiprime without knowing it s factorization. The idea is to transfer this small order to the underlying semiprime using a pairing method derived from the Weil pairing. Knowing if a given specific small order exists can be derived using congruences modulo N.

As you know, the problem is then to avoid a degenerate output from the Miller s algorithm. The problem is the only method I know to avoid this without using the factorization is to use a distortion map that works only with supersingular elliptic curves. But using a supersingular curve caps the order to gcd(p+1,q+1) which is unknown most of the time or just equal to 2. Taking order 2 result in generating outputs equal to 1 or -1. Useless for gcd factoring.

So, any idea of a pairing mechanism that would works over ordinary elliptic curves using embedding degree 1? Possibly using a distortion map that works over ordinary elliptic curves in such a case? Or a pairing that works with simple final exponentiation such as cubing or squaring?


r/cryptography 3d ago

Cryptography books aimed at experienced engineers (15+ years post graduation) - Crash courses and/or frontier cryptography (zkp, quantum, etc)

26 Upvotes

Firstly I have read the wiki for the sub and I have a few of those recommendations open to look through later. Apologies if I missed any recommendations there that cover exactly what I'm asking for, I've tried to give as much detail as I can below to try and show why I'm having difficulty finding books. The TLDR is I can't trust that the cheap ones are not complete slop and I can't trust that the expensive ones aren't full of graduate level software-side information, way too advanced for what little maths I remember or not modern enough to cover the areas I'm interested in. I realise I may need a few different books to cover everything, all recommendations are welcome.

My experience / knowledge -

I have 15+ years in software development in various high value fields and the past few years of my career have been spent implementing authentication and authorisation. I have a pretty good handle on things as a consumer of libraries and from the concrete implementation side. I understand the basics of key exchange, symmetric vs asymmetric, diffie-hellman, RSA, elliptical curve encryption (very basic!), public/private keys, trapdoor functions, hashing, salts etc.

Why I'm asking instead of doing my own research -

I find myself wanting to understand more on the theoretical side and especially of the frontier techniques like ZKP, quantum-resistant algorithms and the like. In the current world of AI I find it very difficult to trust any book written in the last 4-5 years, however I need a recent publication to cover these subjects comprehensively hence asking for advice on here.

Target / goal -

If it helps with recommendations my main motivation is trying to develop open source zero knowledge alternatives to the current push for mass surveillance. I need to know that what I build is secure, well-grounded and that I can say with confidence that nothing leaks from the user's device, even accidentally. For that I think I need a very good grounding in cryptography and a working knowledge of using kali or similar to check traffic and the like. I do realise the kali side is probably beyond the scope of this sub but throwing it out there in case people might wear both hats and have recommendations for courses or books


r/cryptography 5d ago

Why use checksum if I already verify the signature?

12 Upvotes

Hello, I noticed that whenever I download a Linux distro, to verify that it has not been modified, it is required that I download 3 files:

"SHA512SUMS.sign" to verify the checksum's authenticity,

"SHA512SUMS" to verify the ISO's integrity,

"the ISO" to install the OS.

Why would they add the checksum in the middle, verifying the signature already verifies both authenticity and integrity. Why don't they just sign the ISO? I don't understand the purpose of the "SHA512SUMS" file.


r/cryptography 5d ago

Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) project ideas

12 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I recently graduated with an undergrad in CS, with a focus in cybersecurity. My final year project was about the Kyber algorithm used in PQC. I did an implementation of the enc + dec and then did a brute force attack to (in a way) "prove" the security.

I’m currently trying to work on a new project, but I’m having trouble finding something that feels really relevant or interesting. I’m good at mathematics and algebra, so I was able to learn the LWE concepts myself. However, my background/major is not mathematics, so I’m a little worried that anything significantly more complex might be beyond what I can realistically grasp. So far, some ideas that i have is

  • machine learning for recovering information from PQC side channel attacks (slightly related to PQC, but the main
  • PQC migration roadmap (mainly for corporate organisations. I’m unsure about this since it would likely be quite generic, and every company has different systems and requirements. It feels more suitable as an article or framework rather than a project)
  • PQC blockchain (not sure how to go about this)
  • anything old but replace with PQC (eg: Vpn with PQC, email with PQC. This feels quite generic to me, since anyone can essentially use an external library or OpenSSL and add PQC to an existing system)

I’m looking for something where I can actually experiment with or analyse the algorithm itself, rather than simply integrating an existing implementation. If anyone else has any idea to suggest, or to collaborate, do let me know!


r/cryptography 6d ago

Hash Based Prediction Market Idea

0 Upvotes

Hello,

I wanted to get feedback on an idea I had and have been working on. Just to start, I am not a professional cryptographer at all, but have always had an interest in this field etc. I wrote a small post to explain what I thought was kind of an interesting idea.

Basically, to remove herd behavior from markets and reduce bot activity, participants would hash their predictions under a specific format, with an event identifier and a nonce before the event occurs in real life, proving prior knowledge. Once the event happens, they can reveal they have a matching hash and can verify it was produced before the event happened. I know that this may only work for binary (yes/no) type events, and a nonce system should prevent like a frequency analysis type attack. Here's a link to the post:

https://jc377.substack.com/p/blind-forecast-commitment-market?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=47kqzt

I really appreciate any feedback, be gentle lol I really am not a professional cryptographer by any means at all! Just wanted to get some feedback from people way more knowledgeable than me here


r/cryptography 7d ago

Seeking Technical Feedback For a Repoducible Open SSL Vulnerability

0 Upvotes

Hello, Im not sure if this is the best place to start but, I'm an independent developer/researcher who has been working on a controlled reconstruction of a historical OpenSSL RNG vulnerability and its effect on cryptographic key generation.

The project is focused on reproducibility and provenance rather than exploitation of third-party systems. The experimental environment uses controlled inputs and owner-generated/synthetic targets, with the goal of determining whether historically vulnerable key-generation conditions can be reconstructed in a defensible and independently reproducible way...

So far, I've built a preserved experimental package containing reproducible artifacts, documented controls, integrity hashes, provenance records, and controlled reconstruction results. I've also filed a U.S. provisional patent application covering aspects of the work.

I'm now looking for technically qualified people who might be interested in independently reviewing the methodology and evidence.

In particular, I'd value feedback on:

- whether the experimental controls are sufficient to support the claimed causal conclusions;

- what evidence an independent cryptographic evaluator would expect before considering the reconstruction methodology validated;

- what additional provenance/reproducibility tests would strengthen the work; and

- whether this type of historical cryptographic reconstruction has useful applications in security research, legacy cryptographic-risk analysis, or forensic validation.

I'm deliberately not posting any implementation details or anything that could facilitate unauthorized recovery.

I'm also not claiming that the work has been independently validated yet—that's one of the reasons I'm posting.

If anyone here works or knows people professionally in cryptography, implementation security, OpenSSL, or security evaluation and would be willing to point out weaknesses in the methodology or discuss independent validation, I'd genuinely appreciate the feedback.


r/cryptography 9d ago

Why cryptographically secure random number generation must be difficult to reverse

10 Upvotes

CSPRNG algorithms like Blum Blum Shub make use of one way functions to transform one PRNG state into the next. For example, modular squaring of the state (modular square root requires factoring) or modular exponentiation (discrete logarithms are computationally hard).

It seems that the reasoning is, if the random state is compromised (state compromise extension attack), then the attacker would be able to know what the future random numbers will be but not what the previously generated random numbers were. I am not finding any information on why this particular requirement is important. How is it useful to be able to keep past generated random numbers secret when future ones are compromised?


r/cryptography 9d ago

What obscure cryptographic feature have you ever needed but couldn't find in a Python library?

2 Upvotes

I'm working on a Python cryptography project and I'm deliberately trying to go beyond the usual feature checklist.

The common stuff is already covered by existing libraries: standard symmetric/asymmetric cryptography, hashes, KDFs, signatures, etc.

What I'm interested in is the opposite end of the spectrum:

What is the most obscure, niche, weird, legacy, specialised or "I can't believe I actually needed this" cryptographic feature you've ever needed?

For example:

  • an obscure/legacy encryption format
  • an old disk/container format
  • a particular version of a standard
  • a weird key derivation scheme
  • compatibility with some ancient software
  • parsing/decrypting a format that almost nobody uses anymore
  • a specific binary crypto-related structure
  • unusual padding/encoding conventions
  • cryptographic file-format detection
  • historical ciphers or machines
  • interoperability with a non-Python implementation
  • some operation that exists in another language/library but is missing from Python
  • something you implemented yourself once and never want to implement again

The more ridiculously niche, the better.

I'm not asking for "what crypto algorithm should every library support?" I specifically want things where the answer might be:

Please describe the actual use case if possible, not just the algorithm/format name.

Also interested in features that aren't necessarily cryptographically modern or recommended for new systems — compatibility and forensic/research use cases count too.

What obscure crypto functionality would make you say: "Wait, this actually exists?"


r/cryptography 9d ago

Reverse-engineered a 2000s SPYRUS LYNKS (Fortezza) USB HSM — fully mapped it, but it needs vendor software (En-Sign/SPEX) from a now-defunct company. Anyone have it?

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4 Upvotes

r/cryptography 9d ago

mTLS explanation

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone. Could someone explain mTLS to me? How does mTLS work? How are the public and private keys used here? How does authentication and verification work, and so on?


r/cryptography 10d ago

Encryption Project Help (Beginner)

1 Upvotes

I'm supposed to do a project for college. In this I am trying to stimulate a smart home environment. I'm using some sensors and motors(light, IR, stepper up motor etc) to gather up the data. The main part of the project is to encrypt that data at the point of conception of data. I'm using a ESP32 for the micro controller and I'm supposed to encrypt it there itself.
At first i chose homomorphic encryption, as it sounded complicated but had a python library. So, seemed enough to satisfy the proff. As i soon learned, I can't do that in a ESP32. Right now I'm considering Elliptical Curve Cryptography for the encryption. I saw all the videos on it i could find. I'm still going Python ECDSA library documentation. I asked chatgpt what math concepts I'm supposed to learn, and it seems like i know all those concept. I'm overwhelmed and I don't know if i'm going in right direction at all. Can anyone help?


r/cryptography 11d ago

Could entanglement be used as an authentication credential rather than for QKD?

0 Upvotes

To be clear, I’m not proposing Quantum Key Distribution.

I know QKD uses quantum states/entanglement to establish shared secret key material. What I’m wondering is whether pre-shared entangled states themselves could act as a possession-based authentication factor.

Imagine a future with cheap, long-lived quantum memory. A server stores one half of many entangled pairs, while a physical token in the user’s home stores the other halves.

During login, the server sends a random challenge specifying which unused qubits to measure and in which bases. The token returns the results, and the server measures its corresponding qubits and checks the correlations. Those pairs are then discarded.
So the security property would be:

-“Prove that you physically possess this specific quantum resource.”
rather than:

- “Use quantum mechanics to generate a shared encryption key.”

My questions are:

- Is this genuinely different from QKD cryptographically?

- Do existing quantum-authentication protocols already work like this?

- Would random measurement bases or Bell/CHSH-style tests make the credential meaningfully unclonable?

- Would this offer any real advantage over a classical hardware token such as a YubiKey?

- What attacks would break it, especially relay attacks?

I’m not claiming this is a new idea - I’m mainly curious whether long-lived entanglement could theoretically function as a physical authentication credential.


r/cryptography 11d ago

KryptoMagick Playing Card Ciphers

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2 Upvotes

r/cryptography 13d ago

VC Port 0.3.7 — open VeraCrypt file containers on Android and iPhone (FOSS, offline, stable alpha)

4 Upvotes

I made VC Port — a phone app that opens the same VeraCrypt file containers (.hc.tc.vera, or any disguise name) you already use on a computer.

This is not VeraCrypt. I am not allowed to use that name. It is a derived work with the VeraCrypt volume core, so TrueCrypt License 3.0 is inherited (not a random TrueCrypt revival). Phone UI is Apache-2.0.

What it does

  • Pick a locked file (on the phone, or a file on a USB stick — not the whole USB disk).
  • Type password / PIM / keyfiles. Master build does not remember passwords.
  • Browse folders on a Mounted tab inside the app. This is not a system drive — Files / Files.app cannot browse the unlocked folder. That is intentional (seizure / forensic leftovers).
  • Copy or move several files between the phone and an open volume, or between two open volumes.
  • Create new volumes on the phone (with the same finger-scribble entropy step as the desktop wizard, mixed with the OS CSPRNG).
  • Share encrypted — send the locked file as-is, no password on the send.
  • Panic wipe / Dismount clears secrets on the phone. The ciphertext file is not deleted.

Platforms: Android + iPhone. Offline by default — FOSS build has no INTERNET permission. No ads, no analytics, no crash reporters.

Honest limits

  • Not unbreakable. A compelled password still wins.
  • 0.3.7 is a stable alpha, not 1.0, not a Play/App Store build.
  • GitHub APK is a debug-signed preview. Production = build FOSS yourself and sign with your keystore.
  • iPhone: unsigned IPA — you sign with your Apple ID (AltStore / SideStore or Xcode). I do not ship a store-signed app.

Not included: whole-disk USB unlock like OTG Master. If your stick is one big VeraCrypt partition, use OTG Master or a PC. If the volume is a file on the stick, pick that file in VC Port.

Links

I am Shivam Mangesh Pingale — still doing a five-year IT engineering degree, built this because I wanted something I could actually use on a phone. Open to suggestions, teaching, internships, or work ([shivampingaledev@proton.me](mailto:shivampingaledev@proton.me) · [shivampingaledev@gmail.com](mailto:shivampingaledev@gmail.com)). No pressure.

Security issues: please use the repo’s SECURITY.md, not a public exploit thread.


r/cryptography 13d ago

What exactly is in cryptography?

0 Upvotes

Hey so I wanted to learn cryptography as I am into crypto and wanted to make some advance projects and as crypto runs on cryptography so I thought to learn it, but when I saw some resources all they did was telling what these terms do (like XOR, caeser) so I am confused as how will we be able to make projects , ps I can't learn somany things...


r/cryptography 16d ago

Run a 2-of-3 threshold signing ceremony in your browser (FROST, Wasm)

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5 Upvotes

r/cryptography 17d ago

The ePrint:2026/1591 Quantum Algorithm Does Not Solve DCP

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22 Upvotes

r/cryptography 18d ago

Interesting crypto address or 'hash' conjecture: "True burn address"

13 Upvotes

To preface, I don't have a cryptographic background. But I had an interesting thought:

People sometimes send Bitcoin to mistyped addresses, which no one ever has had the private key for. Or let's say I manually type a random address without using a private key, like a random jumble of characters that fits the length and format. But in theory, if by luck you got the private key by random typing, you have control of the address.

My conjecture is: does there exist a possible address where no possible private key exists?

If it exists, it is a true burn address and nothing can be returned from it, even by quantum computers or luck.

Forgive me if this has already been talked about or I am missing something.


r/cryptography 18d ago

Is the master secret for SLIP39 (Shamir Backup) generated the same way as Entropy is for BIP39?

2 Upvotes

When playing around with these tools (Which I know you should not use for your phrase to store funds), it seems to me the entropy field which can be made visible by checking off the "Show entropy details" box in the BIP39 tool and the master secret field in the SLIP39 tool are the same. They are both hexadecimal values and can be 128 or 256 bits.

Is the SLIP39 master secret also generated by entropy when generating a SLIP 39 Shamir Backup? How is the master secret generated?

I found this article explaining step by step how a BIP39 phrase is generated and it starts with entropy, wouldn't SLIP39 be the same by starting with entropy?

https://medium.com/coinmonks/mnemonic-generation-bip39-simply-explained-e9ac18db9477

https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ https://iancoleman.io/slip39/