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> Never mind the fact that virtually all Bitcoin development is done either as a hobbyist project or by fly-by-night operations that end up getting fully compro
by kylebrown 15y ago
> Never mind the fact that virtually all Bitcoin development is done either as a hobbyist project or by fly-by-night operations that end up getting fully compromised.
The last (and hopefully only) time a critical vulnerability was found in bitcoin was in May '09: it was exploited on the testnet and then patched. The largest bitcoin exchange did have a security breach in July '11 and suffered a loss of 6k bitcoins, but the rest (most of which were in cold storage) remained secure (at least 424k bitcoins). And in the most recent incident, a couple of popular services lost a combined 50k bitcoins (the users were not affected) because Linode was compromised.
Your "fact" is entirely disingenuous.
Bitcoin is certainly not a silver bullet to securely using on a compromised machine (and nobody is claiming that it is). Obviously no system will ever 100% protect stupid/compromised users. But many credit card numbers are compromised mid-stream or at a malicious PoS. The public-key nature of bitcoin protects against those attacks.
- tptacek 15y agoI like this argument, which tries to separate the "security" of the Bitcoin protocol/cryptosystem from the security of its implementations, so that the protocol can serve as a sort of inverse straw man to deflect attention from the comically poor security track record of Bitcoin as it actually works in the real world.
- kylebrown 15y agoThe implementations of the protocol (the cross-platform bitcoin daemon) have been securely working in the real world since May '09. This track record is what inspires confidence in the protocol. The security of any particular web app related to bitcoin is not the security "of bitcoin". The only reason bitcoin-related web apps are so extensively probed is due to the security of the protocol (bitcoins are valuable because the protocol and its most widespread implementation is believed to be secure). The security track record of any highly targeted industry is generally poor, including banks, fortune 500 companies, credit card processors, and shopping carts. To say that the security of bitcoin-related services is any worse than these is unfair.
- tptacek 15y agoI disagree that the security track record of Bitcoin companies is comparable to that of banks.
- kylebrown 15y agoHere's three examples of poor security of banks (and another for one of the largest Forex brokers) from the past year. http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/20/hackers-snatch-6-7m-in-south-african-cyber-bank-robbery/ http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/20/hackers-snatch-6-... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/citibank-hacked/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/citibank-hacked/ http://www.medianama.com/2011/09/223-hdfc-banks-database-was-hacked/ http://www.medianama.com/2011/09/223-hdfc-banks-database-was... http://news.softpedia.com/news/Swiss-Forex-Marketplace-Compromised-210211.shtml http://news.softpedia.com/news/Swiss-Forex-Marketplace-Compr...