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Bitcoin price dropping november 2017
So many times we have learned about cryptography and security the hard way. One of the key problems is ignoring the advice and warnings, which are plainly written in the current crypto literature.
This without the slightest ambiguity, so that there is very little doubt about what a reasonable and professional security practice is. It is hard to believe that in bitcoin things could ever become as bad as above. In bitcoin arguably, there is maybe no reason to panic yet, no efficient attack is known, nobody is yet quite sure if this curve could be broken. However fundamentally this is just strong suspicion, and there is nothing solid.
We do not release our report on this topic yet, to be released in the future, however the main points are again already widely known, see for example our presentation at the Catacrypt workshop on CATAstrophic events in CRYPTography, which took place in San Francisco on 29 October , cf.
Here is what Dan Brown, the chair of SECG , the very same industrial standards body which have proposed, specified and standardized this elliptic curve in the first place, have written about this back on 18 September I did not know that BitCoin is using secpk1. I am surprised to see anybody use secpk1 instead of secpr1. It is very interesting to discover that apart from bitcoin nobody else uses this elliptic curve ever cf.
This is probably because crypto developers usually understand that they are subject to professional and legal liability, which is particularly strong in the financial sector. In fact a real cautious and conservative approach and good security engineering practice should be to upgrade ASAP, in order not to take chances and precisely avoid legal liability in case of problems. All this sounds like really bad news for bitcoin.
In fact it is not that bad. No one can guarantee that one elliptic curve is secure enough for a serious application such as bitcoin. For this reason we need to switch, and switch again… We need crypto agility. It is important to switch once to be able to ever switch at all.
It is like a security drill. An industry-leading example of how to manage this process was explained to us by Alison Mankin, director of VeriSign Labs, during the same recent CataCrypt conference in San Francisco in October Every quarter you MUST switch and change the crypto algorithm. Forcing everybody to switch allows to make sure that everybody remains compatible wrt to future upgrades and the crypto CAN be changed and upgraded much more easily at ANY moment in the future.
Otherwise you are NOT able to upgrade at all when there is a problem, for example just because many systems will stop working or some angry customers will complain. Crypto currencies should embrace the same philosophy: There is no new argument or fact not previously discussed in known sources.
We just rediscover the same key issues and we disagree all the same. I have limited sympathy to P and it is no longer what cryptographers recommend nowadays either.
A lot of things are happening in this space recently. Clearly however even today the NSA said these curves are not so bad and the arguments has some weight.
The bitcoin elliptic curve remains an ultra sectarian choice. All the points in this controversy remain open and we recommend to study them as a good example of controversy about cryptographic standards. The debate is likely to get exacerbated even more in the near future for example due to Microsoft FourQ proposal. Finally maybe one day we will discover some really serious attacks. If only one elliptic curve is weak, any of these, it will be a major worldwide security scandal [ADDED In the meantime users who want their bitcoins to be safe are politely asking for bitcoin developers not to gamble with their bitcoins in the name of a conservative choice.
Is Computer Security a Pseudo Science? Your email address will not be published. Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. In other words, bitcoin should not use it and nobody else should. Solutions and Risk Mitigation The main solutions to this problem are: It is easy to upgrade and use another elliptic curve starting today, see this post.
On the Need For Elliptic Curve Agility No one can guarantee that one elliptic curve is secure enough for a serious application such as bitcoin. It is not easy to write for an ignorant audience. The startup and industry culture is sometimes just the opposite. Or because researchers in cryptography only understand well the arguments and motivations of other researchers in cryptography. In cryptography attacks get better each year, they rarely get worse.
In addition, in this rebuttal, our highly respected bitcoin crypto and development authority claims that it is reportedly very difficult to upgrade and that it requires a large consensus.
Here we regret that by default the consensus is to be more careful about cryptography and have a backup solution in place. As soon as they are clearly at least some cryptographers on this planet who think that this form of cryptography is potentially dangerous and should not be used, developers should work produce fixes and alternatives.
It is claimed that there are no good alternatives and we are stuck in a match of type bad vs.