Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bitcoin Core trial balloon: splitting blockchain engine and wallet

From: "Dustin D. Trammell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 19:04:12 -0600

On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 01:09 -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Recent IRC discussion have floated a rough proposal for a wallet
> next-step:  Running the Bitcoin Core wallet as a separate process, a
> separate binary, from the blockchain engine.  The wallet process would
> communicate with the blockchain engine using existing RPC and P2P
> channels, becoming a real SPV client.  This accomplishes a
> longstanding security goal of sandboxing away wallet keys and
> sensitive data from the network-exposed P2P engine, in a separate
> process, among other benefits.

PLEASE.

For those of us that prefer the reference software and also manage
multiple wallets, having to store a copy of the blockchain for each one
eats up disk space quite quickly.  If I could run a local blockchain
server (or a local network one, even) and then have whichever wallet I
start up use that instead of maintain its own copy of the blockchain, my
world would be much, much happier.

Sandboxing keys and sensitive wallet data away from the attack surface
introduced by the network interfaces into another separate process is
also a good security move.  Don't forget to sanitize your IPC inputs (:

Thanks,

-- 
Dustin D. Trammell
[email-masked]
http://www.dustintrammell.com