Questions tagged [security]
This tag should be used for questions regarding security issues with the design or implementation of Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies.
654 questions
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What’s the purpose of checking for input overflow?
Everyone knows this famous fix for block 74638 which still exists in other files. But there’s something I can’t understand, why check for inputs overflow since it’s not possible to have enough utxo ...
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0answers
11 views
Does Bitcoin security rely on the assumption of nearly continuous transactions? [duplicate]
So for an attacker not to overcome good nodes, I believe we rely on the fact that blocks are always being produced, making the attacker essentially outpaced. But in the extreme and ridiculously ...
0
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1answer
33 views
Automatically close the bitcoin-qt when enable SSL for RPC
I Just try to enable SSL for bitcoin-qt RPC call. I follow the SSL on RPC
link to archive my target. But I am getting the following error and close the bitcoin-qt automatically.
I am using the ...
0
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1answer
26 views
How does the Blockchain detect a cheater, who manipulates the blockchain?
Let's assume we have 100 blocks. One miner x has the intention to manipulate block 90. So he has to recalculate the hash for block 90. Following he also has to recalculate the hashes for block 91-100. ...
3
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1answer
38 views
Malicious full nodes causing denial of service attacks
To control >51% of the mining power in bitcoin is impractical due to the immense investment that will be required. Also, The Bitcoin Core client has DoS protection against malicious nodes forwarding a ...
0
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0answers
18 views
secure Multi-Party Computation (sMPC) in Enigma?
In Enigma whitepaper (>> Link to the Enigma paper <<), in section 5.1 "Overview of secure multi-party computation", page 4, explains how to divide a secret s into multiple shares, using ...
0
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1answer
52 views
Private key generation doubt
I read that the private key pk has to be any number between 1 and n, where n is almost 10^77.
Since pk' s function is practically to be used as a scalar for multiplying the generator point G, why does ...
0
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1answer
29 views
Are transactions with the same ScriptSig a security problem?
For instance while looking at the transaction stack of my address, tracing it to exchanges I use, I came across this:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/...
2
votes
1answer
366 views
Are lightweight LN wallets vulnerable to transaction withholding?
As far as I know, LN requires the user to watch the blockchain in order to perform penalty in time. However, running full node is probably a heavy burden to some users, especially to mobile phones. I ...
0
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1answer
16 views
Security of ChaChaPoly (IETF rfc7539) in the noise protocol framework of the Lightning Network
According to this paper ChaChaPoly is secure against chosen known plaintext attacks. I wonder however if that security assumption is weakened by a lot since messages sent on the transport layer of the ...
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2answers
49 views
Why was noise XK fundamental pattern chosen in the transport layer (BOLT 08) of the lightning network
I am currently reviewing the transport layer of the Lightning network protocol. It builds on top of the noise protocol framework handshake patterns.
What I don't get: Why was the fundamental pattern ...
5
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1answer
111 views
Why is the length of the transport messages on the lightning network encrypted?
From BOLT 08 we can see that every message is sent in the following way:
2 byte: length
16 byte: MAC
[length] byte: Encrypted message
16 byte: MAC
In reality these messages will be send over TCP/...
5
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1answer
101 views
Does MuSig have the same security as 2-2 multisig?
Disclaimer: This question is of theoretical importance to me trying to educate myself better on cryptographic principles and signature schemes. I don't intend to imply that in practice schnorr ...
0
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0answers
42 views
How may bitcoins hash algorithm be secured in the future from quantum computing brute forcing?
Other threads already answer very clearly that quantum comps could easily "break" /attack bitcoins chain.
Now: Are there any ideas among the bitcoin devs circulating out there, how to save bitcoin ...
0
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2answers
41 views
If a bitcoin wallet service provider terminates a users account, what happens to the funds?
A friend of mine has/had a bitcoin wallet service provided by an online marketplace. Sounds like he had some kind of disagreement with the site administrators and they terminated his account. At that ...
0
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1answer
58 views
Permissioned or Permissionless blockchain? Which one is PoS more adapted for?
Since in proof-of-stake (PoS) there is no mining process, according to functionality of permissioned and permissionless blockchains, which type is PoS more adapted for?
In the other words, is a PoS-...
0
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2answers
64 views
How secure is using TOR in Lightning Network?
In following paper (Link to the paper) we read:
"combining Tor and Bitcoin creates an attack vector for the
deterministic and stealthy man-in-the-middle attacks. A low-resource
attacker can ...
0
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1answer
64 views
Does a HD Wallet log my IP when i do a transaction?
Companies like BitPay and Electrum, can log my IP when I make a transaction, right? If so, should I use a Web Wallet (plus VPN) for transactions?
2
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1answer
59 views
Does LN require an on-chain “emergency lane” to mitigate systemic risks?
According to LN social slides, a fee market (in other word: "congested mempool", to my understanding) is good. But, there's systemic risks around penalty mechanism, so some sort of on-chain scaling (...
1
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1answer
37 views
How could an LN node acquire inbound liquidity? Is there any systemic risk?
I once heard that LN could support dual-funded channels. It doesn't seem so complicated, but currently, I don't know any LN wallet which supports creating dual-funded channels.
By the way, I'm also ...
10
votes
1answer
2k views
Bitcoin automatically diverted to bech32 address
I sent bitcoin to an address starting 3Cn using Electrum but the blockchain viewers seem to show that it has gone to an address beginning bc1 as shown in the link below.
Transaction Viewer
How can ...
0
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3answers
78 views
Is it smart to just create wallet and then delete it, writing down the address?
What are possible downsides of practice where I download a bitcoin wallet on my phone, write down the seed and the address, purge the app into nonexistence and continue my happy life, sharing my ...
7
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2answers
2k views
Is a bitcoin address collision possible if generating 90 million addresses every 4 hours?
I am running a test to see if I can obtain a successful bitcoin address collision after generating billions of addresses. I am not entirely sure how I would check them yet. Basically I have an extra ...
7
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2answers
196 views
Can a full node provide a bogus block bloomfilter to a Neutrino node?
When a thin client using BIP157/BIP158 (Neutrino) requests the block filter for the latest block, would it be possible for the full node serving this request to attack the Neutrino node by providing a ...
0
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1answer
83 views
LND Security best practices? Disaster recovery?
Can anyone share a knowledge how to
_ secure LND node
_ backup node with all Channels
I think only a seed will not be sufficient.
What is your plan B in case of disaster? How to do an Emergency ...
0
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2answers
47 views
How could a lightweight wallet determine the validity of 0-conf transaction?
I found that a lot of people are interested about security of 0-confirmation payments. But, it seems that most discussions focused on double-spending (like broadcasting two or more conflicting-but-...
14
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1answer
2k views
What is the origin of insecure 64-bit nonces in signatures in the Bitcoin chain?
In Biased Nonce Sense: Lattice Attacks against Weak ECDSA Signatures in Cryptocurrencies Joachim Breitner and Nadia Heninger use a lattice based algorithm to recover private keys from signatures in ...
4
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1answer
162 views
Lightning Network: asymmetry in the information tracked by each participant?
In following paper, written by Christian Decker et al., there is a paragraph that is not clear to me.
eltoo: A Simple Layer2 Protocol for Bitcoin
"The central idea of Lightning is to invalidate ...
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1answer
46 views
Security implications of removing CHECKSIG in a test
If I conduct an htlc transaction on testnet that does not include OP_CHECKSIG will it still cost an attacker more than (say) $10 in processing power or storage to subvert my tests?
Details: I'm ...
0
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1answer
104 views
Why are the inputs of Bitcoin transactions signed?
This is my understanding of what a transaction looks like:
inputs:
input0:
txid: <funding tx0 TXID>
outputID: <output ID of UTXO in the funding tx0>
scriptSig: <...
6
votes
1answer
1k views
Why is increasing block size in the Bitcoin network considered to decrease security?
I have been doing some research on the Bitcoin Cash hard fork and the main contention of increasing the block size appears to be the possibility of less security on the network. How does an increased ...
0
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1answer
52 views
How does using a Turing-complete programming language compromise the security of the network? [duplicate]
I have read many places that the decision for Ethereum to use a Turing-complete programming language sparked a lot of concerns over security. From my understanding, not using a Turing-complete ...
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0answers
43 views
Why Spectre has a “weak” liveness?
According to this article: (https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre-protocol-7dbbebb707b5) written by one of Spectre's author (Aviv Zohar), it is mentioned that Spectre has weak liveness.
What is ...
2
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2answers
137 views
Exact definition of “Liveness” and “Safety” properties in a consensus?
Two main properties of a consensus are "Liveness" and "Safety".
What are the exact and precised definition of "Liveness" and "Safety" properties in a consensus ?
Are the following definitions ...
-1
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1answer
39 views
How Spectre tolerates spam transactions?
Spectre is a DAG based (directed acyclic graph) distributed ledger (a structure as an alternative to blockchain based distributed ledger).
Is there any mechanism in Spectre to prevent sending spam ...
2
votes
0answers
80 views
Sybil attack with IOTA?
IOTA is one of the DLTs uses DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) as data structure.
The solutions to attacks proposed by IOTA white paper seems unconvincing, in particular, in case of double-spending, it ...
1
vote
1answer
45 views
Security of Bitcoin Wallet
I have a doubt on Bitcoin wallet. Suppose I have an online Bitcoin wallet. Now, someone breaks into my computer and steals my Bitcoin wallet. Fortunately I have a
backup of my wallet on another ...
4
votes
1answer
376 views
Why was an insecure merkle tree implementation chosen?
At risk of creating a "lets discuss politics" question, let me clarify that what I want to know is whether there is a known benefit to Satoshi's "duplicate the last hash" merkle tree implementation ...
0
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1answer
34 views
Does Electrum store my seed in their server?
I am new to Bitcoin. I used Electrum software to create my first wallet. When the software generated 12 words, I had written down that in paper. These word are very important, right? But the software ...
2
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1answer
116 views
Byzantine Fault Tolerance Threshold of Bitcoin: 1/2 or 1/3? (Edited)
According to this answer: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/58908/41513 a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus threshold is 1/3.
On the other hand, there is a common belief that Bitcoin network ...
11
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1answer
255 views
Schnorr's batch validation
In the recent BIP about Schnorr's standardization, Pieter Wuille presents an algorithm for batch validation. In my understanding the most heavy operation is the multiplication by a scalar: to make ...
0
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2answers
29 views
Hiding identity in digital currency era
I have a question about the security of digital currencies, however still I have find a clear answer for that. No matter what is the currency, e.g bitcoin, monero, ..., at the end of the day, I have ...
1
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1answer
28 views
What would happen if I publish a modified version of an earlier block? Would it be rejected immediately by peer nodes?
I am reading the book "Mastering Bitcoin" and have finished reading Chapter 2 and 10, but I still don't find the answer.
Suppose the current main chain has 5 blocks:
B0 <- B1 <- B2 <- B3 &...
1
vote
1answer
48 views
Have there been any examples of people manipulating transactions in a way that waiting for more than 1 confirmation would avoid?
A lot of bitcoin exchanges require some minimum amount of confirmations before they consider money deposited.
Is there any evidence that this actually does anything? Has someone ever before ...
0
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1answer
74 views
Why can a wallet not compute the private-key from a public-key?
my goal of questions this is why any wallet not able to compute private key created with public key generate?
1
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2answers
49 views
Can't understand specific problem of Bitcoin anonymity
There is an problem shown in bitcoinwiki:
Someone runs both a money
exchanger and a site meant to trap people. When Mr. Doe buys from the
exchanger and uses those same coins to buy something ...
2
votes
1answer
82 views
Can I, and should I, verify bitcoin core source code before compiling it?
If I use bitcoin core binary release I can verify them with the gpg keys of the core developers. Is there a similar process for the source code? A follow-up question: Is it preferable to use signed ...
2
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2answers
240 views
What can you do with the private key?
I am trying to understand all security regarding blockchain and bitcoins.
Let's say you have a bitcoin wallet which is secured, only you know the private key. This bitcoin address was created on one ...
1
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1answer
26 views
Review sites for the hardware wallets? [closed]
As I understand it there are four (4) hardware wallets produced currently (2018).
Which businesses, web sites, or academic papers in the field review and compare the security of these devices? Is ...
3
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1answer
122 views
A couple of questions on Schnorr sig
In the BIP by Pieter Wuille it is told that the key prefixed version of Schnorr signature is needed when the scheme is used in combination with BIP32's unhardened derivation. Could someone provide an ...
