The randomness of vanitygen is secure enough?

If two people running vanitygen 1abcdefg What is the chance that both of the person will get the same public key & private key?

If a billion supercomputers each tried a billion keys per second for a billion years, the odds of a key collision would still be less than one in a billion.

I hope that the answer is less than 0.0000001.

Yes, much less.

But for this vanigygen need to use random algorithm (not simple while(true){ i++; test()}).

It just needs a random starting place. You can increment from there if you want to. The number of possible starting places has 77 digits when expressed in decimal notation.

David Schwartz

Posted 2016-07-27T08:10:48.507

Reputation: 46 931

How computer can get genreate random starting place, that have 77 digits...? If it is just new Date().valueOf() it is not real random – Aminadav Glickshtein – 2016-07-27T13:01:01.183

@Aminadav: You may want to read about cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators.

– Nate Eldredge – 2016-07-27T15:27:07.353

1@Aminadav This is a very well understood problem! Getting randomness right is hard and extremely important and the developers or crypto-currency software (at least, the competent ones) are very careful to get it right. Often sources of real physical randomness are used such as shot noise, microscopic zone temperature variations, and turbulent shear forces. (Real computers are not theoretically perfect machines, they meet the analog physical world in measurable ways.) – David Schwartz – 2016-07-27T16:12:55.180

That my question if I can trust this open source software vanitygen. How the choose a random problem? What is it based on? – Aminadav Glickshtein – 2016-07-27T18:09:13.143

@nate. I have read the wiki. It tally about security. It doesn't explain how machine computer can Behar the forest initial state random number – Aminadav Glickshtein – 2016-07-27T18:12:53.633

@Aminadav Vanitygen follows current best practices, including using the system's entropy pool on platforms that have one. The system's entropy pool mines physical randomness caused by things like jitter in the CPU clock signal caused by temperature variations in its quartz crystal. (Vanitygen didn't implement this themselves, that would have been foolish.) – David Schwartz – 2016-07-27T18:14:45.570

@Aminadav It also uses multiple sources of randomness and an algorithm that ensures the result is as at least as strong as its strongest input. So you can mix in system memory information, disk timing, and all kinds of other things without fear that using too many weak sources will produce a weak result. – David Schwartz – 2016-07-27T18:24:32.290

I have found that it is a real secret how those random number generators works. But some people reverse engineer this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptGenRandom#Method_of_operation

– Aminadav Glickshtein – 2016-07-27T20:15:29.027

The randomness of vanitygen is secure enough?

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