Ripple: Only XRP Private Keys That Used Software From Before August 2015 Are Vulnerable

Ripple software libraries published before August 2015 potentially rendered private keys which signed multiple transactions vulnerable, Ripple announced in a statement released on Jan 16.

Recent research jointly conducted by the DFINITY Foundation and the University of California revealed that a portion of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple addresses are vulnerable.

As is known among cryptographers, the security of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithms employed by the aforementioned cryptocurrencies is highly dependent on random data, which are known as nonces.

"It is well known that if an ECDSA private key is ever used to sign two messages with the same signature nonce, the long-term private key is trivial to compute [crack]."

"In the case of cryptocurrencies, these keys give us, or any other attacker, the ability to claim the funds in the associated accounts. In the case of SSH or HTTPS, these keys would give us, or any other attacker, the ability to impersonate the end hosts."

"All of the attacks we discuss in this paper can be prevented by using deterministic ECDSA nonce generation, which is already implemented in the default Bitcoin and Ethereum libraries."

According to Ripple, deterministic nonce generation has also been part of their software since August 2015.

This feature also makes addresses that interacted with the blockchain employing newer software libraries safe from this vulnerability.

While cryptography is far from perfect, centralized systems like exchanges and single computing systems are successfully attacked with success much more often than private keys, the research states.

Recently news broke that a recent spate of ransomware attacks estimated to have earned hackers 705.08 Bitcoin likely came from Russian cybercriminals, not North Korean state-sponsored actors as initially thought.