Recovering Bitcoin (Dash?) private keys using weak signatures from the blockchain

[pille]

Please have a look at this older article, some of you may already know it:

http://www.nilsschneider.net/2013/01/28/recovering-bitcoin-private-keys.html

I only understood the half of this and have a few questions:

• could this also affect Dash?
• is in general a private key without outputs more secure than one with outputs?
• could this only happen with bad hardware wallets (which?)?

Thank you.

 

[crowning]

The problem lies not within Bitcoin or Dash. You need good random numbers to generate unique signatures.

For software wallets this task is delegated to the underlying operating system, and those are quite good these days.

For hardware wallets this depends on the hardware/software/OS used, so there's a) no general answer and it's b) often almost impossible to find out. If you decide to get a hardware wallet I'd wait until someone has reviewed the random number generator and published the results.