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I've been thinking for a while that the current security methodology for wallets is not great. YES, that statement is extremely obvious on the face of it. But,
by Uptrenda 2y ago
I've been thinking for a while that the current security methodology for wallets is not great. YES, that statement is extremely obvious on the face of it. But, I mean, think of some of the basic measures people take. This hardware wallet crap, okay great, your keys are kept somewhere safe and there's offline signing, but so what? Boop the users head until they give up the wallet. H4xt funds. We should be able to designed a robust threat model for cryptoassets using smart contracts that resists many kinds of attacks (including kidnapping.) This is hacker news so I guess people will want details on how this might work.
I would probably start with how people use their money. If people have t funds, they usually aren't going to move it each day. So start with a fixed, daily spend limit. That's simple, to start with. Then past the spend limit, you might have extremely large, outlier transactions. This is an interesting phase because with actual non-shit-tier security you could have a secondary layer of confirmation. This could be based on different panic codes. Some could indicate that the transfer is being made under coercion and to notify law enforcement, some could indicate to accept the transfer and notify, and so on. You could outsource this to a third-party. Do you see what I mean? All this shit is easy to do with cryptography and actual good design. But no ones done it. I thought of this in the time it took to write this shitty post.
Provable deniability schemes can be done to make it look like a wallet only contains a certain amount, too, using various private transaction schemes. This is nothing new. These attacks of being forced to do reveal keys and so on are things cryptographers have thought of for a long time. It's why you had Truecrypt have the fake volume. There is other stuff you can add to the security scheme. Giving different persons a key and making them sign their portion. Co-signing by third-parties (already a thing -- the scheme I like best is keys.casa). Many different ideas to allow for funds to seem like they've been "sent" then allow for revocation later on. You could have all different enhancements to high value, anomalous transfers like forcing the incumbent of transfers to take longer and have a clearing phase and so on. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to improve it even further. Just some ideas for how to stop attacks like this.
Whenever I see headlines about hacked exchanges, hacked wallets, lots keys, broken transfers, etc... I just think that we're still at the stage where there's a fractal of shit and we have to do better. Make everything work flawlessly and without even thinking about it.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoIt's like you're saying, make crypto more like real money — like how transfers over $10K trigger regulatory scrutiny. From my understanding (nocrypto) fans of crypto like that it's not like real money.
- krisoft 2y agoBut how would any of that help in this case? They didn’t break his wallet, they didn’t force him to transfer money personaly. They kidnapped him and his wife and then cut off his finger and sent the finger to his associates asking for money. The transfer would be initiated by the associates who are free. What would a panic code help there? The only thing which might change things is the ability to reverse transactions. That would make the kidnappers keep them longer. At the cost of making every transaction on the blockchain less trustworthy. Not really a clear win.
- faraggi 2y agoMany or all of these already exist- look up smart contract wallets. ...and they wouldn't have helped in this case, see other comment about that.
- qqqult 2y agohardware wallets are a safe transaction signing device NOT a seed storage device You use them to sign transactions that are perfectly safe even if your computer / phone where you initiated the transaction is infected with malware. They give you a chance to confirm that the transaction you're signingon the hw wallet is the one you initiated on your computer. > daily spend limit > different panic codes > Co-signing by third-parties What you describe already exists in "software multisig wallets" on smart contract blockchains. In essence they're smart contracts that require n of m signatures to initiate a transaction and can handle variable spending rules, custom signing schemes, 3rd party signers, things like 2FA / email for signing. In theory they can be implemented for non-smart contract blockchains like Bitcoin using multi party computation schemes like FROST (https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/frost https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/frost) but that's a lot harder