Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Safer sighashes and more granular SIGHASH_NOINPUT

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2018 19:41:02 -0800

On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 at 14:37, Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Here is a combined proposal:
> * Three new sighash flags are added: SIGHASH_NOINPUT, SIGHASH_NOFEE, and SIGHASH_SCRIPTMASK.
> * A new opcode OP_MASK is added, which acts as a NOP during execution.
> * The sighash is computed like in BIP143, but:
>   * If SIGHASH_SCRIPTMASK is present, for every OP_MASK in scriptCode the subsequent opcode/push is removed.
>   * The scriptPubKey being spent is added to the sighash, unless SIGHASH_SCRIPTMASK is set.
>   * The transaction fee is added to the sighash, unless SIGHASH_NOFEE is set.
>   * hashPrevouts, hashSequence, and outpoint are set to null when SIGHASH_NOINPUT is set (like BIP118, but not for scriptCode).

Thanks for all the input so far. Going over the suggestions and other ideas:

* OP_MASK should be required to be followed by a push, as suggested by
Anthony Towns. The alternative would permit substituting arbitrary
opcodes for masked pushes, which is at least very hard to reason
about. This would effectively turn it into a multi-byte OP_MASKEDPUSH
opcode.

* It's probably better to sign the amounts of all inputs, as suggested
by Johnson Lau. As that would cause default sighashes to sign all
input and output amounts, is there still a need to sign the tx fee
explicitly? Or in other words, are there situations where changing the
set of inputs or outputs after signing is desired, but the net
difference between them cannot change? If not, that would remove the
need for NOFEE.

* Do we need to keep the rule that sequence values of other inputs are
only signed with default sighash? It feels cleaner to always sign the
sequence values of all inputs that are included in the sighash anyway
(so all of them, unless ANYONECANPAY or NOINPUT, which would make it
sign only the current input's sequence value). If NOINPUT also blanks
the sequence values (as currently specified by BIP118), and all input
amounts are signed, that would make amounts/sequence values always be
treated identically.

* If MASK implies NOINPUT, and NOINPUT implies ANYONECANPAY, the 3 of
them can be encoded in just 2 bits using the
PARTIALSCRIPT/KNOWNSCRIPT/KNOWNTX/ALL_INPUTS encoding Anthony Towns
suggested.

* Regarding the discussion about preventing signatures from being
rebound to a different script(path)/checksig:
  * With MAST there is indeed less need for this, but at least
single-tree MAST constructions cannot replace all script branches (a
script with 40 IF/THEN/ELSE constructions may have 2^40 different
execution paths, for which computing a Merkle tree is intractable).
  * Just signing the opcode position of the CHECKSIG operator isn't
enough for all cases either. For example, you could have a complex
nested set of branches that puts a number of pubkeys on the stack, and
then a CHECKMULTISIG after the last ENDIF to verify all of them. In
such a situation, if the same key can occur in multiple combinations,
you still may want to prevent a signature generated for one
combination from being rebindable to the same key in another
combination. I believe that signing the opcode position plus the
true/false condition of all previous(?) IF statements is probably
sufficient to achieve that, but it would also introduce unnecessary
complexity for signers in most cases (see next point).
  * Thinking about signing code, adding these sort of execution trace
commitments to the sighash means they need to know which checksig
operator etc. they are signing for. I believe that in practice for
example HW devices will just whatever position the wallet indicated,
rather than verifying it corresponds with a particular intended code
path. Preventing rebinding isn't very useful if an attacker can make
you bind to the wrong thing regardless, so I'm not convinced this is
even worth having by default.
  * An alternative (not sure who suggested it) is to simply make every
CHECKSIG sign the opcode position of the last executed CODESEPARATOR
(and remove the earlier cut-of-scriptCode effect of CODESEPARATOR).
This gives a simple (but somewhat limited) way for scripts that need
to prevent certain kinds of cross-execution-trace rebinding.

A few misc ideas:
* (Taken from https://github.com/jl2012/bips/blob/sighash2/bip-sighash2.mediawiki)
For a default sign-everything sighash, the sighash byte can be
dropped.
* For the commitments to the scriptPubKey and scriptCode, an
intermediary hash should be used (so the data included in the sighash
includes a hash of those, rather than the script directly). This
prevents a blow up in hashing time for large scripts with many
different sighash types in its signatures.
* When masking the scriptCode, the push opcode immediately following
OP_MASKEDPUSH can be replaced by OP_VERIF (which will never collide
with any real script, as OP_VERIF makes a script invalid even when
occurring in an unexecuted branch).
* Sighashes (and really all new hashes that are introduced) should be
prefixed with a fixed 64-byte array as "tag", chosen to not collide
with any existing use of SHA256 in Bitcoin, to prevent signatures from
being re-interpretable as something else. Picking 64 bytes as tag size
means it can be efficiently implemented as just a modified SHA256 IV.

So a combined proposal:
* All existing sighash flags, plus NOINPUT and MASK
(ANYONECANPAY/NOINPUT/MASK are encoded in 2 bits).
* A new opcode called OP_MASKEDPUSH, whose only runtime behaviour is
failing if not immediately followed by a push, or when appearing as
last opcode in the script.
* Signatures are 64 plus an optional sighash byte. A missing sighash
byte implies ALL, and ALL cannot be specified explicitly.
* The sighash is computed from the following:
  * A 64-byte constant tag
  * Data about the spending transaction:
    * The transaction version number
    * The hash of txins' prevouts+amounts+sequences (or nothing if ANYONECANPAY)
    * The hash of all txouts (or just the corresponding txout if
SINGLE; nothing if NONE)
    * The transaction locktime
  * Data about the output being spent:
    * The prevout (or nothing if NOINPUT)
    * The amount
    * The sequence number
    * The hash of the scriptPubKey (or nothing if MASK)
  * Data about the script being executed:
    * The hash of the scriptCode (after masking out, if MASK is set)
    * The opcode number of the last executed OP_CODESEPARATOR (or
0xFFFFFFFF if none)
  * The sighash mode

Cheers,

-- 
Pieter