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RE: Tomshwom's Advanced Crypto Security Guide (Part 3) - Creating a Secure Wallet
Thanks for this three part guide! Well written, concise and really informative! I have a question regarding BIP 39/ BIP 44 standards, to which I cannot find a clear recommendation anywhere online.
For security reasons, do you recommend testing the newly generated addresses within your wallet (e.g. bitcoin, ethereum, ripple) with a small in- and outbound transaction, or will the risk of having your public key exposed outweigh the risk of "corrupt" private/public key pairs being falsely generated through the BIP 39/ BIP 44 standard?
Thanks for your reply!
There's no security risk with exposing your public address, but it is a privacy risk. If you don't want that address to be connected to another public address you use, then transfer the amounts from an exchange (they mix coins and give new addresses for every transaction on many exchanges.)
Really though, as long as you can access the public key through the private key multiple times, there's no reason to test it through transactions. You're only testing to make sure the network functionality works for your wallet by doing that, not whether or not you can access the wallet. It's pretty safe to just double/triple check that your private key accesses the same public key.
I say private key, but it could be mnemonic seed phrase or whatever else is used to derive the private key too.
Thanks for your answer! So if I understand this correctly, you are saying that there is no risk that private/public key pairs are falsely generated (do not match!) through the BIP 39/ BIP 44 standard? So if I generate any public key within my wallet there is no need to test whether I can actually access it with the private key (e.g. sign messages, transfer funds)?
I was thinking specifically with MEW in mind, where you input the private key/seed phrase into the "View Wallet Info" tab. With this, you know your private key -> public key without having to send a transaction.
Sorry if it was just bad wording, but this is incorrect. You generate a private key, and the private key's Keccak-256 hash (last 20 bytes) is what ends up being your public key. You do need to make sure that the private key accesses the same public key for every instance of storing your private key, not because the math won't work, but because the private key could've been corrupted or copied wrong.
Thank you! :)