12 ms·
Security At Coinbase
- cdjk 13y agoI'm curious about the paper backups - how do they do it, what's their recovery procedure, and have restores been tested?
- shabble 13y agoCould use something like PaperBack[1], which can handle >1MB/A4 sheet. Combine that with a decent quality printer/paper and autofeed scanner, and you could quite easily dump a few hundred MB without too much manual effort. I believe "offline wallets" require only the (relatively) short keypair to be stored, which would make this a practical solution. If they're using much fewer wallets, or are confident that the paper would be last-ditch restore only, they could print (semi-)human-readable data in an OCR optimised font, to give them some chance of recovering from otherwise corrupted media. I'd put more trust in the automated bitmapping with sufficient redundancy & forward-error correction, but wouldn't discount extra semi-manual methods for any high-value wallets. [1] http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/ http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/
- nwh 13y agoThey would be done in the way that I personally do, or at least something similar. The private key is split using Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme into several pieces, which is then printed as a high-redundancy QR code and then hidden. The key only needs to be 256bit, so there's not a lot of data to hide.
- ukd1 13y agoI feel like coinbase is the safest place for me to keep my bitcoins; they're doing everything I'd love to do and more, but don't have time for. I would love to know an outline of; - How you segregate access to offline funds from staff members who don't require access - Coinbase development process and how it helps you minimize releasing security issues :-)
- gesman 13y agoWell, announcing "how secure we are" is very stimulating to someone's desire to hack in for the upper hand bragging rights. I'd suggest to be secure minus bragging part about it.
- lectrick 13y agoSecurity via obscurity. Got it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
- herge 13y agoYou'd feel more confidence in the security of the system if less people desired to try and hack it?
- gesman 13y agoI'd feel more comfy to keep money elsewhere until "us vs. them (and we bet your money on it)" security bragging spree would be well over.
- tptacek 13y agoAre there really 20+ bug bounty payoffs for this one application? On the one hand: kudos for running an effective bug bounty program. That's an impressive amount of community engagement. On the other: this is just one Rails app, right?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- citricsquid 13y agoSome of them are fairly interesting and not just simple exploits, for example Coinbase prices BTC based on a third party exchange and due to the way that they fetch the pricing it was possible to manipulate the price down to below market levels and make a bunch of money, they paid out 5 BTC for that and it's on the bug bounty page, although it's not a "security" issue per-se. Probable that some of their others are similar in nature. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mjjfb/how_i_successfully_manipulated_coinbases_price/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mjjfb/how_i_succes...
- seiji 13y agoIsn't security is under one of those "things you can fix later" startup problems these days? As far as I can tell, it goes: hype to serve growth to create a fad to exponentiate your user base to get you more funding to ... then start considering fundamental problems of architecture and security. All startup writing focuses on growth at all costs by manipulating pleasant surface experience. The current model of "just keep iterating until users stick" is also: know as little as possible and keep changing things until you generate a random key to the lock of your market. That model of company building is in opposition to security and stability. Just keep paying 21 year olds 150k salary+100k bonus to make rails apps. It'll all work out in the end.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ateevchopra 13y agoHacking 101 - Nothing is 100% SECURE.
- rfnslyr 13y agoCompletely off topic but wow that is a REALLY beautiful website. Great at displaying information and great use of icons too. Definitely going to add it to my list of inspirations when designing.
- joe_the_user 13y agoDoes beauty have to involve difficulty in reading? I mean, maybe great beauty does involve not communicating a lot of factual information clearly. Great art and even beautiful print magazines generally don't do this. Having the text all across the page did not make the information very accessible to me. And going from the huge light-blue banner to the gray and white was actually rather jarring. It took me a minute to decide I had to scroll down to the text rather than clicking a "next" button or something. And icons looked nice but like most icons were more eye-pleasing than actually communicative. I'm surprised some people find it beautiful but I'll file it under "once interface design made computers (barely) usable, designers decided they had to make them unusable again (but now beautiful)". It's the world of "satisficing".
- rfnslyr 13y agoLink examples of websites that elate you.
- joe_the_user 13y agoThis is designers and programmers talking at cross purposes. I don't know if I've been elated by a website lately but I'm a bit doubtful I'd even want to be. Mostly I want the useful information to go down easy without excess eye-strain and only then do I notice beauty (and naturally I prefer the understated version of beauty). Wikipedia and hn are two of many examples of sites that are easy to read (though the text on hn is rather small, it's right for it's purpose since it makes threading easy). I do have wall paper of great art if want to be inspired or elated but mostly I chose "real life" activities for my elation.
- 13y ago
- brryant 13y agoIf you're a believer in security by obscurity, then this isn't the way to go :)
- tedivm 13y agoI'm honestly not that impressed by this. They're basically picking some basic types of exploits and are claiming to guard against those, which is nice and all but it seems like they're targeting the buzzword issues and aren't talking about anything really special. There were a few things that really stood out to me- * SQL Injection is something every web application should do. This is a completely separate issue from CSRF (cross site request forgery), but they conflate the two as if they're one. Talking about specific issues they're focusing, especially when those things are not only extremely basic to deal with but also what I would consider programmer buzzwording makes me wonder what they aren't doing. * Payment Industry Best Practices means a hell of a lot more than "we through an SSL certificate on the site" and "we encrypt your junk". If you're going to claim that you're following payment industry standards I want to hear a little bit about PCI compliance and I sure as hell want an external audit. * The Bounty Program looks nice, but the fact that it has so many people who have used it and that they clearly aren't disclosing the issues that come up leaves me a bit concerned. How serious are these issues, why weren't they found in advance, and what internal changes took place to prevent them from happening again? The main point I'm getting at here is that this seems like a marketing site, not a real security disclosure page, and that when you really get down into it they're saying a whole lot of nothing. If they really want to impress me they can get into more technical detail, and if they don't want to do that I'd love to see a third party audit them properly.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rhizome 13y agoMaybe it's more of a "Coming Soon: For Sale" post.
- fsckin 13y ago>90% of customer funds are stored offline. >Offline storage provides an important security measure against theft or loss. >We distribute bitcoin geographically in safety deposit boxes around the world. Using offline, split, encrypted files has a huge amount of security: Breaking into n+1 bank vaults (simultaneously) is not enough. That's pretty nice. It's not 100% secure, but probably better than average compared to online wallets or exchanges.
- drwl 13y ago"We whitelist attributes on all models to prevent mass-assignment vulnerabilities." Sounds like what happens in Rails 4
- tmorgan 13y agoI like the sound of most of that, especially the two-factor authentication on all accounts. One thing wasn't clear to me, "Wallets (and private keys) are stored using AES-256 encryption." Are individual users wallets stored with a key derived from the users password? Or, rather, could you act, under coercion say, to transfer my funds without my password? (i.e. in a "bank robbery" situation)
- lwhalen 13y agoThey're so committed to security, they're making my ticket asking 'why was there a security token sent to my phone when I did not log in?' rot in whatever queue for a week now.
- aresant 13y agoQuick note if devs are looking - your landing page is broken @ 1024x768 resolution: http://imgur.com/fiVin0M http://imgur.com/fiVin0M Chrome latest build Win 7
- crystaln 13y agoWhat happens in the event of a world catastrophe, like a terrorist attack, plague, or meteor strike, killing key people, limiting travel, and otherwise inhibiting recovery of all these distributed tokens and keys? Security is not only protection from being hacked, but protection form loss. If Bitcoin is to survive political, economic, and environmental turmoil, shouldn't we worry about our coins being stored with such potentially fragile recovery plans?
- karamazov 13y agoI'll only have myself and Coinbase to blame when the zombie apocalypse comes and I can't trade my digital currency for canned beans and shotgun pellets.
- haeqon 13y agoSadly, they're doing a lot better than most of the Bitcoin community. I recently found two exploitable XSS issues on Blockchain.info, a website which runs the largest number of Bitcoin based wallets in the entire network. To get a response from them, I had to use a public front-page post on reddit just to get an email address to contact. https://pay.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n57uj/im_attempting_to_reach_a_security_contact_at/ https://pay.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n57uj/im_attempti... Had either bug been used maliciously, every user visiting almost any page on the site would have lost their web wallet with no further interaction. It was of course, "not an issue", despite at my count, three core Bitcoin developers chiming in and talking to the developers of the site, named Zootreeves and MemoryDealers. https://pay.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n57uj/im_attempting_to_reach_a_security_contact_at/ccfpni3 https://pay.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n57uj/im_attempti... Full disclosure: I was later paid a small bounty after it was fixed.
- eruditely 13y agoIt would be great if they could fix their customer service, and their false level 2 account verification status, that still flags the information you provide as false. That status is what makes it 'instant', but you cannot even achieve it with valid info. Then they have the audacity to send you the same email signed by different support staff members. Coinbase is garbage and it's only running because they're the only competitors who have not burned their house down. I'm waiting for improvement, or a valid competitor so I can be on to the next one.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 13y ago[Mostly] off topic: How does one usually go about geographically distributing data in safety deposit boxes? Do you need someone at each location to store/retrieve data?
- ukd1 13y agoI guess you can just encrypt it with their public key, email it and have them print it...just gotta be sure they'll actually do it?
- rdl 13y agoThis seems like a good set of technical controls to mitigate the inherent risk in storing third-party bitcoins. The main thing I'd be concerned about would be insider controls; what happens if someone kidnaps someone significant to one of the founders and threatens to do bad things unless he subverts the control. While it's quite reasonable to lose $5mm or whatever bitcoin Coinbase currently controls to save someone's life, the potential for this kind of attack is what makes it at all likely -- if you could articulate exactly why that attack wouldn't work, it wouldn't happen. ("Someone kidnaps someone important to a staff member" is the hard problem; it also implies a solution to the "staff member goes evil", "has always been evil", "gambling or drug debt", etc. The weakest attack of this type is "someone pwns and employee's laptop or online accounts", which potentially could subvert the display, so a user approves a $10 transaction and a $500k transaction is actually approved.) You'd have to articulate a multi-person control over large pools of the "cold" bitcoins to really deter this kind of attack. This security should be implemented in such a way that people can't easily defeat it, even over time. That's a hard problem in a rapidly growing organization. Strong audit systems to catch this after the fact, combined with preventive controls to minimize the actual scale of an exploit, is fine. I have zero concerns with a loss of less than $5mm or so at Coinbase; the equity value of the company would cover it.
- ukd1 13y agoI would assume that the cold stored coins are encrypted requiring t of n keys to decrypt using some standard secret sharing scheme. This should stop the 90% offline being an easy target for internal issues and also for physical hold-ups / robbery. I'm not sure if publishing the exact method of this would be a good, or a bad thing. Having their bank / storage require a fixed notice period before allowing access to the offline funds - like a time lock - would also make it harder to steal the offline funds. Not knowing their stack outside of the guessed Ruby/Rails, I'd guess the weakest point lies around code deployment.
- GaryRowe 13y agoThese guys need to be investing in hierarchical deterministic wallets (BIP0032 and BIP0039). That would take away all their private key issues.