Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Making Electrum more anonymous

From: Joseph Gleason ⑈ <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2015 23:07:12 +0000

I would recommend the following solution as a decent compromise between
complexity and privacy:

1) Encourage electrum server operators to have their servers reachable as
tor hidden services (.onion addresses)
2) Make sure server discovery works well with .onion addresses
3) Make the privacy a user configurable setting:
  - None - Allows any server connection type
  - SSL - Requires SSL at least, no plain text
  - Tor - Requires tor, no direct TCP
  - Multi-Tor - Uses a variety of tor paths to reach a variety of servers
(maybe configurable number of servers)

Default should be 'SSL' probably.

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 3:20 PM Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> I should add that the obvious resolution to this set of problems is to
> use a distinct Tor route for each Bitcoin address, not to reinvent Tor
> and reproduce its community. So ultimately this is easy to implement,
> but the downside is performance.
>
> But it's important to keep in mind that poor-performing perfect privacy
> for address monitoring is trivial to achieve - just sync the full
> blockchain.
>
> Presumably if you don't trust a server to protect your privacy, you also
> don't trust it with your money. So any robust privacy optimization would
> at least be designed to support partial (SPV) chain clients. It would
> also need to support wallet restoration from backup.
>
> The level of privacy will always be a performance trade-off. The ideal
> solution would allow a client to balance privacy against performance.
>
> e
>
> On 07/22/2015 09:30 AM, Eric Voskuil wrote:
> > Hi Thomas,
> >
> > The scheme is essentially onion routing. The set of {M} are entry nodes
> > and the set of {S} are exit nodes. The weaknesses are as you would see
> > in an analogous TOR implementation:
> >
> > (1) The lack of relay nodes {R} make collaboration between any subset of
> > {M} and {S} trivial.
> >
> > (2) OR is a mixnet, so the size of the network matters a lot.
> >
> > (3) The directory is a perpetual weakness.
> >
> > (4) Content is visible to the exit node (or the final service). This
> > means each address must be passed via a distinct route to prevent
> > correlation.
> >
> > e
> >
> > On 07/22/2015 08:51 AM, Thomas Voegtlin via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> Although Electrum clients connect to several servers in order to fetch
> >> block headers, they typically request address balances and address
> >> histories from a single server. This means that the chosen server knows
> >> that a given set of addresses belong to the same wallet. That is true
> >> even if Electrum is used over TOR.
> >>
> >> There have been various proposals to improve on that, but none of them
> >> really convinced me so far. One recurrent proposal has been to create
> >> subsets of wallet addresses, and to send them to separate servers. In my
> >> opinion, this does not really improve anonymity, because it requires
> >> trusting more servers.
> >>
> >> Here is an idea, inspired by TOR, on which I would like to have some
> >> feedback: We create an anonymous routing layer between Electrum servers
> >> and clients.
> >>
> >> * Each server S publishes a RSA public key, KS
> >> * Each client receives a list of available servers and their pubkeys
> >> * For each wallet address, addr_i, a client chooses a server S_i, and a
> >> RSA keypair (K_addr_i, k_addr_i)
> >> * The client creates a list of encrypted requests. Each request contains
> >> addr_i and K_addr_i, and is encrypted with the pubkey KS_i of S_i
> >> * The client chooses a main server M, and sends the list of encrypted
> >> requests to M
> >> * M dispatches the client's requests to the corresponding servers S_i
> >> (without the client's IP address.)
> >> * Each server decrypts the requests it receives, performs the request,
> >> and encrypts the result with K_addr_i
> >> * M receives encrypted responses, and forwards them to the client.
> >> * The client decrypts the encrypted response with k_addr_i
> >>
> >> What do you think? What are the costs and benefits of such an approach?
> >>
> >> (Note: this will not work if all servers, or a large fraction of them,
> >> are controlled by the same entity that controls M)
> >>
> >>
> >> Thomas
> >> _______________________________________________
> >
>
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