Android bug batters Bitcoin wallets
Users of Android Bitcoin apps have woken to the unpleasant news that an old pseudo random number generation bug has been exploited to steal balances from users' wallets.
The Bitcoin Foundation's announcement, here, merely states that an unspecified component of Android “responsible for generating secure random numbers contains critical weaknesses, that render all Android wallets generated to date vulnerable to theft.”
Such wallets would include Bitcoin Wallet, blockchain.info wallet, BitcoinSpinner and Mycelium Wallet. The problem is this: the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm – ECDSA – demands that the random number used to sign a private key is only ever used once. If the random number generator is used twice, the private key is recoverable.