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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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I have Excel spreadsheets at home though and you can be assured that they haven't changed if you take a hash of them.
In fact, taking cryptographic hashes and signatures of people is automatic with Adobe signature products, and is how I signed for my house mortgage. You know, things that people really don't want changing or someone doing shenanigans with. Just a click here and a send the .pdf over and... yeah, its not that hard in practice.
Signed, immutable proof of the transaction that nobody can manipulate. It also doesn't require a legion of ASICs hashing numbers until the end of time. Because your "blockchain" is vulnerable to the 51% attack if the hashrate ever declines precipitously.
This is true, the fundamental of a blockchain is simply signed blocks of binary data. We can get into the debates on weather this can work in a public system like many groups are trying now, though I presume that that is not really what the poster is talking about since most public chains fundamentally rely on thier cryptocurrencies to to function, which for some is an argument as to why they can't work.
My cryptographically signed .pdf for my mortgage document requires no cryptocoin or "blockchain" to function.
Its just simple hashing and signatures. You know, standard cryptography. The thing that allows "HTTPS" connections? The thing that signs your credit-card each time you enter it into Amazon? The thing that signs your password as you type it into the password field?
Yeah, that's cryptography. Not "cryptocoins" or "blockchain", its just a cryptographic hash, signature, or encryption.
if you just keep your document on your machine and only use it for personal encryption sure. its a key exchange network, this is for when bob and alice want to talk, not look at something in the safe and put it back. distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades, im not sure about this current incarnation of public systems but I find a lot of promise in many other applications.
I'm not sure if you fully understand what I'm talking about.
https://www.docusign.com/solutions/industries/mortgage
I'm talking about real world business. I'm not getting a $300,000 mortgage leaving a pdf on my personal computer. I'm talking about real world applications here.
Yeahhhh.... no. Its point-and-click these days. Most people don't even realize they're utilizing PKI to handle typical business transactions. It literally "just works", click click boom. It happened, and is legally binding, happens hundreds-of-thousands of times a day across this country and is perfectly functioning cryptography.
so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:
the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only "trust" needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:
some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.
Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far.
If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.
I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.
And... where does FTX and Celsius come into the mix? Because in practice, that's where people lose $8 Billion overnight.
Cryptocoin folk pretend they got this "trust" issue figured out, when in actuality, they just technobabble fake words and pretend that I haven't taken a cryptography class in college. Guess what? I know what a hash is, I know how PKI works and I can implement BTC or Monero.
Just because Cryptocoin community is ignorant of very trivial hacks (ex: a hardware wallet using a shitty RNG which would leak the private-key), and is ignorant of how they are unable to trust even the most basic of operations in their house of cards doesn't mean anything. (Are you sure that your hardware wallet generates real, random numbers? And not a pre-made list of ~1-billion, easily hacked wallets?)
Cryptocoin fans can't even solve the hardware wallet trust problem, let alone any other trust issue going on in their little world.
That's a different conversation isn't it? shifting from technical capabilities to what people do with them, we have a number of technologies in society that deal with this issue. Important to note that every form of messaging and storage tech ever conceived has likely or is capable of facilitating large scale fraud.
I understand wanting to point the anger, as someone who sat this tech out until I saw the govt take it seriously, I'd say collectively every government and municipality slept on this, which surprises me, I expected this to get killed long before it capped at 2T in value.
Also important to note that cryptocurrency technology was not central to the failure of these orgs as the vast majority of thier holdings never left the exchange. They bascially setup shop claiming to have the tulips everyone was raging for in full warehouses when they didn't even have seeds. I'm angry at the abject greed as well, however if we apply the current thinking im seeing toward crypto tech as it would logically extend, get ready to throw out all the tech in your house, a surprising amount of it can be used to manipulate and defraud you. Most of FTX's messaging went out over traditional communication channels, controlled by our governments and endorsed by broadcasters.
You're saying a lot of words and not addressing the hardware cryptocoin wallet problem I outlined above.
Lets focus on that. How do you know that a hardware cryptocoin wallet truly emits random numbers that aren't being hacked? The trust problem in this cryptocoin world is horribly, horribly unsolved despite 15+ years.
That's why these scams keep coming up. Because the "oh just trust the cryptocoin" approach doesn't work. You need to think from the perspective of a security researcher.
you are talking to someone whos been doing cryptography since the 90s, the answer hasn't changed since then, you cant. the ONLY was you can be sure is with old school means or controlling your own lithography system.
most people just pick what level of trust/control/effort they are most comfortable with and go with that. the more your life ends up under these keys the more youll want to move to physical storage, multiple cold wallets, etc etc.
This usability nightmare is part of whats hurt crypto's adoption imo.
Why are insecure devices allowed to be sold? I don't know, why do we let comcast sell routers with known firmware vulnerabilities that gets a large chunk of them infected with malware? Why do we only deal with dangerous things after they become dangerous and hurt people, esp when the danger is so damn obvious? I don't know.
Is there a hardware wallet I like that I believe is secure? No
Do i use them? Well of course, insurance companies love them...sigh.
Do I use them for my personal stuff? No, the vast majority of my holdings are stored in physical cold wallets.
So we can't trust hardware wallets then. Isn't that... a problem? Something that needs to be solved?
This is pretty fundamental to the entirety of blockchain. If we can't trust that Alice is truly Alice, then where the hell is everything else built on top of this crap?
Why do you trust that cold wallet? Are you sure they didn't leak the key somehow? We've already established that there's no trust or reason to trust them.
If I were a cryptocoin blackhat, I'd sell a bunch of broken RNGs to the idiotic cold-wallet people and slowly steal money from them over the next 20 years. Its like the easiest steal ever, the entire crytpocoin community is completely blind to how fucking stupid they are.
Are you sure that those people who think they've "forgotten their passphrase" really forgot their passphrase? What if its the cold-wallet that betrayed them?
yup, huge one, something I have sat across the table from the engineers of some of the leading hardware wallet companies and asking them to address. so far what I see are a bunch of companies lining up to say "trust me bro", I look forward to better options though I suspect that no matter how you cut it, due to people wanting convince it will still be you trusting someone, its just a question of how tight your grip on thier throat is. or you go techno-hermit and build your own kit if you really need something digital.
Its a physical set of steel discs with the key encoded on them, locked in a safe with a copy locked in an off-location safe. they leak about as much as one might expect things in your safe might leak. do you control these places? I often think about systems like this looking top provide tiers of control and ownership, you own your accounts legally, physically AND technically. a data breech at a bank using this system drains only the banks accounts, yours are fine (assuming a correct fail-safe desgin)
You should get on that, I'm sure it will work really well, you realize there have been people working on satoshi's cold wallets for over a decade? When this cryptography breaks it will be an advance in quantum tech and we will all be boned.
Wow, a band of rng guessing thieves only targeting wallets that have been lost by those who would reasonably believe they forgot or lost access to thier key, this sounds like a script hollywood will need in its new AI future!
hmac(passphrase, "one") -> seed used to create the private key.
Its so god damn simple man. Passphrase is the key. Standardize the solution so that when Hmac(passphrase, 'one') emits the same private key on two separate devices, we know that their code is legitimate. Run tests on commercial solutions to make sure they emit the standard answer to a set of publicly known private-keys (as well as a few personal tests to ensure it works on your end) and bam, problem solved.
You're telling me that all the best cryptocoin wallet peeps can't come up with a college-textbook answer like that?
As other keys are needed, use hmac(passphrase, "two") and hmac(passphrase, "three"), etc. etc.
No. The answer is that no one is really trying to solve the info-sec issue with regards to cryptocoin. Its just a money game to them. There's elementary / college-level solutions that are in the front of any textbook (or maybe left as an exercise, that you'd find at the back of the book / answer key).
When the level of cryptography knowledge is this primitive, I know that the entire damn community ain't serious about it and I shouldn't waste my time with them.
thats how it works, im not sure what you are getting at?
Oh really, wallet hardware companies are publishing the hmac and algorithm used to go from passphrase to private key?
Care to post one?
there are opensource wallets, the standard is called BIP39
im not sure if any of the hardware providers are doing it though
im still not sure what you are getting at, if you are suggesting I somehow trust hardware cold wallet providers, I dont, does not mean Im not stuck using the tools.
I'm saying there's an obvious solution to anyone who has passed a cryptography 101 course here.
PKI private keys are randomly generated prime numbers and/or ellipitcal curve numbers (depending on algorithm). Either way, that random number generator needs a seed, and that seed can be based off of the passphrase. BIP39 isn't the whole solution, that's just a way to turn long-strings of alpha-numeric characters into binary data.
My overall point is that there's a blatantly obvious, simple solution to the hardware wallet problem. I brought it up because its not a hard crypto-problem to solve. The fact that there's no adequate solution in 15 years is a failure of the cryptocoin community. Not due to a failure of basic cryptography problems.
The cryptocoin community, despite using "cryptography" is a joke. They barely know how to use cryptography even at its most elementary levels. It takes 15 years to come up with crappy, untrusted hardware wallets and they still can't open a basic textbook to come up with a better solution that's already written down.
the issue with the hardware wallet is not a "simple math" problem but a "trust" issue. in reality you simply can't trust any hardware you didn't make yourself, in practical use we usually pick vendors we like and decide to trust them.
for example. many people considered ledger trustworthy until they introduced firmware that indicates a capability to exfiltrate the keys.
I think the problem you are speaking to was some older hardware keys (and maybe some strange off brands) that encode keys at the factory, to my knowledge no major product does anything like that and they take pains to show you are generating the key. the big back and forth there has been with hardware providers using methods that are potentially reversible or other types of vulnerabilities.
Yes pretty much all devices will allow you to import a key you have generated by whatever means you prefer, however once you put it on the device you are signing up for the other issues that come with hardware still.
I don't think you recognize how easy it is to generate trust with the methodology I laid out.
"The Standard-compliant" method is any algorithm that goes from hmac(passphrase) into seed -> generating the random numbers needed to build a wallet. (Prime numbers or whatever). As far as I can tell, this "standard method" doesn't exist, not yet anyway.
Issue has been the workflow for that, everyone wants something that works with thier phone and self-updates. Also have only seen a couple good air-gapped signers. No one likes the offline signer story except finance governance ppl so far.