From: William Yager <will.yager@gmail•com>
Cc: Bitcoin Development <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposal: Encrypt bitcoin messages
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:59:14 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAG8oi1PSnuP2UHqNRbcwmU8TPEh__Nw-npa=itQrUsnNeMVkBw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <b7934ce1-a22f-42d2-92ed-bc5a1c3a27be@email.android.com>
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What, exactly, do we hope to achieve from having end-to-end encryption?
Even if it worked perfectly, it wouldn't be very useful.
But it won't work perfectly, because we don't have any method of
authentication. The bitcoin network is trivially MITMable. It's designed to
work even in the face of that, but any encryption we implement will just
get blown away by anyone who cares enough to stand in the middle of two
nodes.
As far as I can see, we get a microscopic obfuscatory advantage over a very
weak passive attacker, at the cost of hugely increased software complexity
(and possibly increased CPU time).
So again; what do we hope to achieve? Why bother? Not a lot of sensitive
information is transmitted in the clear. The little information that might
be considered sensitive is better protected by anonymization (a la Tor),
not encryption.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-08-20 0:59 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 32+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <CA+8=xuJ+YDTNjyDW7DvP8KPN_nrFWpE68HvLw6EokFa-B-QGKw@mail.gmail.com>
2014-08-19 9:49 ` Raúl Martínez
[not found] ` <0C0EF7F9-DBBA-4872-897D-63CFA3853726@ricmoo.com>
2014-08-19 15:11 ` Raúl Martínez
2014-08-19 15:30 ` Richard Moore
2014-08-19 16:07 ` Justus Ranvier
2014-08-19 16:38 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-08-19 16:58 ` Angel Leon
2014-08-19 17:19 ` Christophe Biocca
2014-08-19 17:35 ` Johnathan Corgan
2014-08-19 23:38 ` J Ross Nicoll
2014-08-19 23:39 ` Justus Ranvier
2014-08-19 23:54 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-08-19 23:40 ` Jeff Garzik
2014-08-20 0:16 ` Peter Todd
2014-08-20 0:21 ` Jeff Garzik
2014-08-20 0:41 ` Peter Todd
2014-08-20 0:59 ` William Yager [this message]
2014-08-20 1:14 ` Peter Todd
2014-08-20 1:19 ` William Yager
2014-08-20 1:27 ` Peter Todd
2014-08-20 0:49 ` Justus Ranvier
2014-08-20 0:57 ` Peter Todd
2014-08-23 16:17 ` xor
2014-08-23 16:50 ` Justus Ranvier
2014-08-23 17:50 ` Troy Benjegerdes
2014-08-23 18:22 ` William Yager
2014-08-23 18:44 ` Mike Hearn
2014-08-23 19:02 ` Luke Dashjr
2014-08-23 22:51 ` Peter Todd
[not found] <c45a638f1e1640fe84bef01d12cda4c3@hotmail.com>
2014-08-20 3:23 ` Un Ix
2014-08-20 5:40 ` Cameron Garnham
2014-08-20 14:37 ` Mike Hearn
2014-08-23 6:39 ` Troy Benjegerdes
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