New Bitcoin Proposal BIP461 Aims to Detect Hidden Key Leaks

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP461, authored by Liam Gilligan and merged into the BIPs repository on Sept. 16, introduces a deterministic signing procedure for ECDSA to help identify potential wallet secret leaks. By establishing a benchmark for expected signatures, the proposal allows users to compare outputs from different signers to detect deviations that might indicate malicious firmware hiding key material. The implementation does not require consensus changes and limits signatures to 70 bytes in standard DER encoding.