Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Mock introducing vulnerability in important Bitcoin projects

From: Ryan Grant <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2021 20:15:56 +0000

Due to the uneven reputation factor of various devs, and uneven review
attention for new pull requests, this exercise would work best as a
secret sortition.

Sortition would encourage everyone to always be on their toes rather
than only when dealing with new github accounts or declared Red Team
devs.  The ceremonial aspects would encourage more devs to participate
without harming their reputation.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_team

The scheme should include public precommitments collected at
ceremonial intervals.

where:
  hash1 /* sortition ticket */     = double-sha256(secret)
  hash2 /* public precommitment */ = double-sha256(hash1)

The random oracle could be block hashes.  They could be matched to
hash1, the sortition ticket.  A red-team-concurrency difficulty
parameter could control how many least-significant bits must match to
be secretly selected.  The difficulty parameter could be a matter of
group consensus at the ceremonial intervals, based on a group decision
on how much positive effect the Red Team exercise is providing.

Upon assignment, the dev would have community approval to
opportunistically insert a security flaw; which, when either caught,
merged, or on timeout, they would reveal along with the sortition
ticket that hashes to their public precommitment.

Sortition Precommitment Day might be once or twice a year.