From: Cameron Garnham <da2ce7@gmail•com>
To: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Emergency Deployment of SegWit as a partial mitigation of CVE-2017-9230
Date: Fri, 26 May 2017 09:30:08 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <D0299438-E848-4696-B323-8D0E810AE491@gmail.com> (raw)
Hello Bitcoin-Dev,
CVE-2017-9230 (1) (2), or commonly known as ‘ASICBOOST’ is a severe (3) (4) and actively exploited (5) security vulnerability.
To learn more about this vulnerability please read Jeremy Rubin’s detailed report:
http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin//public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf
Andreas Antonopoulos has an excellent presentation on why asicboost is dangerous:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6jJDD2Aj8k
In decisions on the #bitcoin-core-dev IRC channel; It was proposed, without negative feedback, that SegWit be used as a partial-mitigation of CVE-2017-9230.
SegWit partially mitigates asicboost with the common reasonable assumption that any block that doesn’t include a witness commit in it's coinbase transaction was mined using covert asicboost. Making the use of covert asicboost far more conspicuous.
It was also proposed that this partial mitigation should be quickly strengthened via another soft-fork that makes the inclusion of witness commits mandatory, without negative feedback.
The security trade-offs of deploying a partial-mitigation to CVE-2017-9230 quickly vs more slowly but more conservatively is under intense debate. The author of this post has a strong preference to the swiftest viable option.
Cameron.
(1) CVE Entry:
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=+CVE-2017-9230
(2) Announcement of CVE to Mailing List:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014416.html
(3) Discussion of the perverse incentives created by 'ASICBOOST' by Ryan Grant:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014352.html
(4) Discussion of ASICBOOST's non-independent PoW calculation by Tier Nolan:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014351.html
(5) Evidence of Active Exploit by Gregory Maxwell:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html
next reply other threads:[~2017-05-26 6:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-05-26 6:30 Cameron Garnham [this message]
2017-05-26 6:52 ` Andreas M. Antonopoulos
2017-05-26 8:02 ` Cameron Garnham
2017-05-26 8:15 ` Eric Voskuil
2017-05-26 19:20 ` Cameron Garnham
2017-05-26 9:21 ` Tom Zander
2017-05-26 14:39 ` Erik Aronesty
2017-05-26 14:54 ` Tom Zander
2017-05-27 6:37 ` Anthony Towns
2017-05-27 20:07 ` Eric Voskuil
2017-05-29 11:19 ` Anthony Towns
2017-05-31 6:17 ` Eric Voskuil
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=D0299438-E848-4696-B323-8D0E810AE491@gmail.com \
--to=da2ce7@gmail$(echo .)com \
--cc=bitcoin-dev@lists$(echo .)linuxfoundation.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox