Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 174 thoughts

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2018 15:06:53 -0700

On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 4:52 AM, matejcik <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Allowing combiners to choose any value also allows for intelligent combiners to choose the
>> correct values in the case of conflicts. A smart combiner could, when combining redeem scripts
>> and witness scripts, check that the redeem scripts and witness scripts match the hash provided
>> in the UTXO (or in the redeem script) and choose the correct redeem script and witness script
>> accordingly if there were, for some reason, a conflict there.
>>
>> Can you explain why it would be unsafe for combiners to arbitrarily choose a value?
>
> We're worried that the "pick one of non-deterministic signatures" is a
> special case and that most fields don't have this property:
>
> * conflicts in UTXOs, sighash type, redeem/witness scripts, derivation
> paths, are at best a recoverable error, usually an unrecoverable error,
> at worst malicious activity.
>
> * conflict in finalized scripts, in case more than one valid
> finalization exists, might indicate that the Finalizers picked different
> ND signatures, or it might indicate two possible interpretations of the
> transaction (see next point). Picking arbitrarily in the latter case
> would be an error.
>
> * even for partial signatures: if two Signers with the same public key
> use different sighash types, the Combiner shouldn't pick the winning one
> arbitrarily.
>
> It seems generally safer to default to rejecting conflicts, and
> explicitly allowing the Combiner to process them intelligently if it
> understands the relevant fields.

So consider two possible topologies for a multiparty signing:

A) Creator and Updater produce a PSBT T. T is sent to signer 1 who
turns it into PSBT T1. T1 is then forwarded to Signer 2 who turns it
into T12. A Finalizer extracts the transaction.
B) Creator and Updater produce a PSBT T. T is sent to signer 1 and 2
simultaneously, who then produce T1 and T2 respectively. A Combiner
combines those into T12. A Finalizer extracts the transaction.

The only case where "malicious" conflicting values can occur is when
one of the Signers produces an invalid signature, or modifies any of
the other fields already present in the PSBT for consumption by
others. If this were an issue, it would be an issue regardless of the
Combiner's operation, as in topology A no Combiner is even present.
This is generally true I think - Combiners can always be replaced with
just a different (and possibly less parallel) topology of data flow.

So the question is independent of Combiners IMHO, and really about how
we deal with roles that intentionally or unintentionally produce
invalid values. I believe this is mostly not an issue. Let's go over
the cases:
* If a partial signature is invalid, the resulting transaction will be invalid.
* if a non-witness UTXO is incorrect, you'll fail to sign because the
txid mismatches the input's prevout (which you do have to check)
* If a witness UTXO is incorrect, the resulting signature will be invalid.
* If a derivation path is incorrect, the signer will fail to find the
key, or sign with the wrong key resulting in an invalid transaction.
* If a witnessscript or redeemscript is incorrect, the resulting
signature will be invalid (as those go into the scriptCode of the
sighash, and affect the type of sighashing)
* If a sighash type is incorrect, the resulting transaction may be
useless for its intended purpose (but still something every signer
agreed to sign).

So all of this boils down to dealing with the possibility that there
can be roles which intentionally or unintentionally create incorrect
fields in a PSBT, and the solution is (a) checking that prevout txids
match non-witness utxos (b) checking that the transaction you're
signing is one you want to sign (including sighash type) (c) worst
case accepting that the resulting transaction may be invalid.

Now, (c) can sometimes be caught early, by implementing additional
sanity checks for known fields. For example, rejecting PSBTs with
partial signatures that are invalid (feed them through a verifier).
This is something a Combiner can of course optionally do, but so can a
Signer or any other role.

The bottom line is that a Combiner which picks arbitrarily in case of
conflicts will never end up with something worse than what you already
need to deal with. If you disregard the case of invalid fields
(because the result will just be an invalid transaction), then any
choice the Combiner makes is fine, because all the values it can pick
from are valid.

> I agree with your response, and I also think that in technical sense,
> the worst that can happen is an invalid signature. Our concern is twofold:
>
> 1. the produced signature is most likely valid, _for a different
> transaction_ than the Creator intended. It is a transaction that the
> Signer must have authorized, so we could argue that they would not mind
> if that unintended transaction was published. Nevertheless, this opens
> an attack surface.

If you're worried about attack surface, I don't believe rejecting
invalid fields ever matters. An attacker can always drop the fields
you don't understand before giving you the PSBT, making your behavior
identical to one where you'd have ignore those fields in the first
place.

At best, you can make it protect against accidental mistakes that
would result in invalid transactions anyway.

If there is a way to sign a message in a way that can be
misinterpreted as a signature on a different message with a different
meaning, then that is a huge flaw in Bitcoin itself, and not going to
be solved by rejecting to sign unknown fields.

With regard to defense in depth:

>> I would not be opposed to having fields with an explicit flag bit that
>> says "Don't sign if you don't understand this", but I expect that that
>> can also be left for future extensions.
>
> It seems safer to consider this flag be on by default, and leave it to a
> future extension to allow non-mandatory fields. The worst case here is
> that legacy Signers can't natively process new PSBTs (solvable by a
> preprocessor) - as opposed to legacy Signers signing unintended values.

There could be some rule like "if the highest bit of the field type is
set, don't sign", but I don't think there is any current field where
such a flag would be necessary right now.

Cheers,

-- 
Pieter