Shen Yu: U.S. law enforcement agencies obtained 120,000 Bitcoin private keys through random vulnerabilities in 2020

ChainCatcher news, Cobo co-founder Shen Yu stated that U.S. law enforcement has obtained 120,000 Bitcoin private keys, which are currently valued at approximately $15 billion.

It has been disclosed that law enforcement did not acquire the private keys through hacking or intrusion, but rather because they discovered a randomness flaw in the generation of these private keys. According to incomplete statistics, over 220,000 addresses are affected by this vulnerability, and a complete list has been made public. The private keys of these wallets were generated by a flawed pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). Due to the use of fixed offsets and patterns in the PRNG, the predictability of the private keys has increased. Users are still continuously transferring funds to the related addresses, indicating that the risk from the vulnerability has not been completely eliminated.