Title: Securing Bitcoin Protocol Post by: jelly on December 13, 2013, 11:08:41 AM Hello,
I've wrote this as a possible solution to all the people whose account were hacked recently and as a way to make bitcoin more secure, this is only theoratical, and suggests a new altcoin, but if these changes can be integrated into current bitcoin protocol this could be an advantage. Sorry for the crappy format, its a copy paste from a word document.. Introduction: Due to the recent hacks that occurred to many websites and private users, that resulted in the theft of BitCoins arises the need to prevent theft at the protocol level, this need becomes more clear when victims often look at the BitCoin blocks and transactions and seeing their coins vanishes without the ability to interfere with the attack. The following document describes a method to protect BitCoins at the protocol level, creating a new coin called “SafeCoin” (proposed name) - SafeCoin would have transactions pending for a long time (~24 hours) allowing a person to review them and confirm all transactions originated from his account, this will be usefull to protect big organizations that will be able to compare their legit transactions against the publicly published transactions (this might will also contribute to the network since every organization would keep a miner to view the pending transactions). - SafeCoin block creation time doesn’t have to be long and can be set to any value (10 minutes such as BitCoin might be a valid option). - SafeCoin would have two private keys, “primary” and “secondary”. o The primary key would be used to sign normal transactions over the network, as the BitCoin key is used today. o The secondary key would be kept extra safe, and would only be used in case of emergency for the following purposes: Signaling the SafeCoin miners network to stop processing any transactions related to the account (alert the network primary key was stolen). Secure transaction of fund from breached account to newly created account (this key would be “stronger” then the primary key). - SafeCoin miners would stop processing any transactions once they receive a signal containing the secondary key, this will promise no funds can be stolen from the breached account, this is also why we impose pending transactions for a long time, allowing the organization to asses the situation respond accordingly. - To make up for the long delay in transactions a second coin would be created “FastCoin” (proposed name), this coin have a fast block time on ~1 minute and will be used commonly by the public to fill short term funds transfers, this coin will be a fork of BitCoin(or any other improvement of it), with a few modifications: o The two coins (SafeCoin and FastCoin) would have an identical value, the exchange rate would be fixed (either 1:1 or 1:10 or any other) the only difference between them is the time it takes to process a transaction, this is to prevent motivation to hold only one type of coin, allowing each individual and organization to selected the mixture of coins it seems appropriate at the time. o The two coins will live on the same network, so no 3rd party exchanges will be involved in transferring SafeCoin to FastCoin and vice verse. In conclusion: We have described a protocol to provide a secure distributed digital currency called SafeCoin, alongside with a more “day to day” practical coin called FastCoin, SafeCoin can be used as what most people consider bank account since it is rarly used , people would deposit salaries into it and transfer funds to their other account FastCoin, that will be used as cash todays world (fast with limited funds). If your FastCoin account has been breached you will lose the money in it (similar to losing a wallet with cash), but if your SafeCoin account has been breached you will have time to respond and secure the funds at a new account with a new password. SafeCoin is not intended to be used for day to day fund transfers, since its transactions might be canceled within 24 hours both the sender and recipient of funds need to be aware of it, however once a SafeCoin transaction has approved by the network, the same BitCoin approval security modal is applied (the transaction cannot be canceled unless a double spending in a fork chain exists) Keeping the primary and secondary keys at the same place or failure to keep the secondary key secure will result in account breach Nir Cohen |