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r/Bitcoin: engineering-negligence analysis of the Coinkite bug

reddit-engineering-negligence-post

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ve97sw/basic_flaw_devastating_impact_engineering/

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  1. Earliest copy held Current
    seen · Captured here 3,062 chars
    Extracted text as captured 
    post: 1ve97sw
author: eternal_recurrence12
created_utc: 1785751507
title: Basic Flaw, Devastating Impact: Engineering Negligence in the Coinkite Bug
body:
While software bugs are inevitable, the recent Coinkite bug represents a severe oversight by hardware security standards. The vulnerability occurred because a code constant intended for development testing was left active in production, causing the firmware to fall back on a deterministic software pseudorandom generator instead of querying the dedicated Hardware True Random Number Generator (TRNG) embedded in the secure element (such as the ATECC608).

​Beyond the configuration flaw, the release pipeline lacked essential integration testing. A proper quality assurance suite should execute automated regression tests that repeatedly generate seeds, validating statistical entropy variance and explicitly asserting that sequential key generations never collapse into identical or predictable values. What do you guys think, am I on the right track here or do you disagree?

comment: p1fp278
parent: t3_1ve97sw
author: Xen7963
created_utc: 1785760474
edited: 1785766127
body:
Open source should not be a cost saving measure, it is an extra on top of standard QA. How many of these so called open source projects dare to disclose their QA budget I am wondering.

comment: p1g3rj4
parent: t1_p1fp278
author: eternal_recurrence12
created_utc: 1785764941
edited: false
body:
Agreed that open source doesn't replace internal QA, but this isn't a budget issue—it's a lack of basic unit and integration testing.
​The firmware runs MicroPython and C. A simple unit test in Python asserting that entropy generation calls the true hardware TRNG instead of falling back to a deterministic PRNG (Yasmarang) would have caught this in seconds on any local dev environment or basic CI pipeline.
​This wasn't a complex edge-case; it was the total absence of test coverage for a core security invariant

comment: p1g87je
parent: t1_p1g3rj4
author: Xen7963
created_utc: 1785766182
edited: false
body:
Budget is just one measure of the effort, surely they could have high budget but still missed out

comment: p1gd9k5
parent: t3_1ve97sw
author: tenuousemphasis
created_utc: 1785767560
edited: false

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