waxwing on Nostr: Fwiw i thought more about it last night, chatted with Claude about it, and saw a ...

Fwiw i thought more about it last night, chatted with Claude about it, and saw a serendipitous tweet from Matthew Green making similar points in the negative:

I don't think what I'm alluding to here is even really possible at all; you can't really 'verify that you're actually getting random output', and not only because of intermediate hashing steps.

Wish I were wrong but it really seems that way.

There are other interesting ideas around testing, but I want a 'one click' version for a user, and I can't find one unless they generate the entropy themselves and do not mix it with from-device entropy. So dice rolls and similar.

quoting
nevent1q…htd5

We all (who have tech skills) are at least a little bit at fault.

We never developed some kind of norm of: how can you assure your users that their private keys are 'proper'?

Were they supposed to look at them? No.

If you grab your randomness from the OS, you can't know, via testing, that the result will be random for a *user*, who is using a different machine than you. But why don't they have a simple push button test to check by sampling?

Obviously it's a bit harder with HWW but same principle.

Actually I'm genuinely curious what people think about that.