If people don't see this obvious scam, they deserve to lose money. What a joke "1000 BTC is nothing" my arse. Lets downplay how much we're ripping people off so we can buy a new sports car.
Things I don't like :
- Failure to communicate (this thread is the only source of information), opacity. No need for this.
- 1 anonymous dev : Despite the random use of "us" in the posts it seems clear that you are alone developing this coin.
- No roadmap (deadlines or however you want to name it)
- Too ambitious project (Meshnet, Darknet, Coin, Messaging, Skywire, ... ) All this things have already fallen.
- Reinventing the wheel over and over.
- Failure to innovate, the only real innovation of this coin was the consensus algorithm which has been postponed (cancelled ? who knows)
- Bill Clinton, Nuclear submarines and sport cars.
Things I like(d) :
- Focus on the simplicity of the code.
- Long term vision (darknet, skywire, meshnet).
Bitcoin is a toy. The marketcap of Bitcoin is 3 billion dollars and the total thefts in Bitcoin in last year was over 1.5 billion.
In Bitcoin, any one of thousands of things can happen that result in your Bitcoin being stolen. There was a thread in 2012 listing all the Bitcoin thefts and by 2012, they had to create a new thread because the theft list was so long that it exceeded the SQL database character limit.
When you say "not innovative" you mean "difficult to pump" features like "not having 50% of the coins stolen every year" which do not sound exiting to investors and people pumping coins, but it is a fundamental requirement for instructional investors and people using Bitcoin for commerce. 95% of the things in Skycoin are mundane, boring and tedious.
> Too ambitious project (Meshnet, Darknet, Coin, Messaging, Skywire, ... ) All this things have already fallen.Bitcoin is insecure. Without a skywire type system, Bitcoin is dead. Period.
We had to invent a system for addressing nodes by public keys and this was not a choice. This was a requirement for protection against attacks that bitcoin is vulnerable to if an attacker controls the communication channel between Bitcoin nodes. All of the internet routers are backdoored.
The fact that it is a meshnet/darknet and messaging system, comes for free. Its just a very stripped down version of Multiprotocol Label Switching in a cryptographic namespace. It also replaces BGP and the whole thing is 2000 lines.
The government has been trying to push BGPSEC to replace BGP. The internet is currently a network of independent networks peered over BGP. BGPSEC replaces the peer-to-peer internet with a hierarchical central certificate authority. It allows the government to use court orders to shut off internet traffic for non-compliant hosts.
They can demand internet providers install stateful packet inspection hardware and blacklist transit for particular protocols such as Bitorrent and Bitcoin. They can also require IP block lists that drop packets going to particular IP ranges that transit through these networks. The internet has been resisting the transition from a peer-to-peer to a hierarchical system, however the government just seized the regulatory authority to force BGPSEC upon the world. If an internet host is hosting servers for the Piratebay, they will soon be able to blacklist all traffic to or from that host, until the host comes into compliance with whatever demands are made.
The government has subsidized installation of statefull packet inspection and interception hardware at the ISP trunks.
First they will court order the torrent sites out of search results, then they will IP block the servers and seize the domain names. Then they will begin blocking internet traffic by protocol, such as Bitorrent to traffic not using government approved encryption. That capacity is in place.
Skycoin Political Environment This is what the economy looks like
Cellular Industry
As soon as the Bell monopoly was broken, up the companies continued to merge and force out smaller competitors using government regulation.
This is for media ownership
This is for internet companies.
Cable Industry
This is the freight industry
This is the Defense industry
Agriculture
Seed Industry
JPmorgan
Bank mergers.
There are two to four state granted monopolies in each industry. The companies are interlocked, interlocked ownership, interlocked supply dependencies to squeeze out companies outside of the network and interlocking ownership structures through financial sector. They use the government to squeeze out competitors and prevent entry of new firms into the market. Profits are increased, the consumer pays more and the combined percentage the corporations and government can extract from the public is increased. The competition in every industry has dropped, profits have increased. Everyone else is getting poorer who is not in the cartel.
Control of every major industry sector has been consolidated. None of these companies pay taxes. Workers are automatically taxed at +30% through withholding at every paycheck (through banking system) and then the money is given back to companies as tax rebates and government contracts. The companies do what the government says or the government threatens to pull the money and contracts, tanking the stock price. You give them money to create dependence and then threaten to withdrawal the money or offer more money to compel behavior.
In this model, people are resource like oil, where the objective is to maximum the resource extraction from the population
- maximize taxes, which are upward distributed
- print money or government debt and upward distribute
- drive down wages and use high unemployment to reduce worker leverage
- destroy small businesses with regulation, barriers to entry and disallow economic activity outside of the cartel
- use discontent over inequality the system creates to advocate for a bigger, more powerful government which can upward distribute more resources to the cartel, "for the benefit of the poor"
This cluster of companies is now 75% of US GDP and employs 8% of US work force. Its invisible, but in plain sight. They have an industry group that writes the laws and congress just passes them. Congress does not read the 12,000 page bills they are passing. If the law is controversial, they are not even allowed to read it before they vote on it. Its written and decided by the industry groups and then just rubber stamped.
There are price lists in congress for buying political appointees to the regulatory bodies. The industry is regulated for the benefit and profits of whoever buys seats at the regulator. The regulator is the industry group board, where the members of the industry decide how the industry should be structured to extract the most money out of public. The congress and budget determines the distribution of loot between industry sectors.
The farm interests dont have an industry group, but for instance decide that government should set aside this many billion dollars this year, to farmers to leave their farms fallow, in order to create scarcity and ensure a high degree of profit. To shake out the smaller farms, every few years they might decide that government should pay a price to each farmer for each bushel of crop grown, with a quota and most of the quota allotted to the large companies. They then over produce the crop, sending the price down very low and shaking out the independent farmers.
The Emerging Internet Cartel 
If you examine, how these companies operate, they use interlocking supply chains to lower the cost of goods, raw materials within the cartel companies and cut off supply of resources to companies outside of the cartel. They buy up every critical suppliers for an industry and then cut the non-cartel companies off.
Comcast and Time Warner, built nation wide fiber networks. They divided up the market, merged all the cable companies and split them up through merges and acquisitions until there was one company per market. There are two cable companies, but you do not have a choice of which cable company because each house is only served by a single company, so there is effectively a monopoly. They see people cutting the cords on cable television and switching to digital services and they need to maintain and grow revenue. They are seizing the core of the internet infrastructure and centralizing network transit. The internet is built upon reciprocal traffic agreements where two collocated networks agree to transit to each other for free.
They are replacing that, with a network where Comcast and Time Warner control the line to the user. They will allow free reciprocal transit between companies within the cartel, but will squeeze out every other network and force them pay Comcast/Time Warner for transit, to reach the customer. They will squeeze out the smaller network providers and consolidate the industry. This is happening right now. It is happening through corporate maneuvers and through hundred of small regulatory rule changes and government seizure of power.
Comcast is forcing, Youtube, Netflix and all the major content verticals to peer directly with them and pay for transit, to access customers, cutting out Layer 3 and the independent providers. Google is threatening to deploy fiber or a WISP, but the technology is merely a threat against Comcast to reduce their bargaining power, to prevent Comcast from move to metered pricing for service providers who want to access Comcast's user base if they gain a dominant position. So if Google cuts a deal to stop ISP expansion in Comcast's market, they will get preferential pricing but Comcast still will be in a position to extract metered pricing from everyone who wants to send data to users on Comcast's network.
This is a platform war.
The infrastructure is already in place to IP block servers like torrent sites and make websites disappear off the internet. The infrastructure is already in place to disconnect connections by application, such as disabling all torrent traffic, all peer-to-peer traffic or all traffic using non-government approved encryption. Stateful packet inspection hardware has already been installed.
>- 1 anonymous dev : Despite the random use of "us" in the posts it seems clear that you are alone developing this coin.
There are as many people working as Skycoin as there are people who want to work on it. If Skycoin only has three Satoshis instead of ten, then it reflects fault and laziness of the Bitcoin community. When people do not get windows builds, they complain and expect everything. They should find someone who can write a bash cross compilation script and have them do a pull request.
There are literally people who have never programmed before, who learned golang and contributed something. One person learned Golang from scratch and wrote a 6000 line wifi controller library. That is how I determined that I was only getting 1 MB/s inside of house, from a router that was 30 ft away.
There are a dozen of things people could do right now
- go into /src/gui/wallets.go and add optional address parameter for filtering outputs by address
- go into /cmd/ and add a command that dumps the transactions as json (from blocks on disc)
- create a blockdb module for storing the blocks (get block by index, get block by hash), storage blocks in dayfiles
-- go into visor, then make it use the block storage module
- add commands to /src/gui/wallets.go
- move commands json api for block state out of /src/daemon into /src/visor
- write a blockchain explorer that runs inside the wallet (/src/gui/ ), add api calls needed for the blockchain explorer
- write a advanced tab in wallet, that has deterministic key gen, getting addresses, transaction construction by hand, signing. a little jquery app
- help implement Skywire
- help implement merkle-DAG
If I try to do everything, the community will be dependent, because they will expect everything to magically materialize without doing anything, when I could be doing something else instead of googling for four hours about how to get golang cross compilation working with cgo. Different people on the project are working on different aspects, but I should not feel obligated to take on everything that no one else will do, just because it needs to be done.
>- Reinventing the wheel over and over.If OpenSSL did not have a new remote code execution zero day every week or leak bits of the private key during ECDH into the timing channel or leave your private keys in the SSE registers so other people on your VPS can steal your Bitcoin, then we could have kept using that instead of spending three months so we did not need OpenSSL.
Read this.
If you patch or reveal a major bug in OpenSSL, you may be threatened because you removing a bug that other people are selling or exploiting for money. That is why I think there is so much resistance to removing the buffer overflows from OpenSSL, gutting the obsolete ciphers and that is why the memory allocator is wrapped so that valgrind is unable to detect overflows.
This is just one library. This is not even including hardware, the network, the operating system, the kernel, microcode.
The tower is built upon sand.
Rant - OpenSSL is backdoored, timing channel attacks, buffer overflows, accepting improper inputs that leak bits of the privatekey (replace)
- OTR is "secure" however in pidgeon it sends plaintext over wire and saves messages to disc sometimes. usually at start of conversation (useful for timing channel, metadata). If a peer is authenticated and later changes their public key, there is no notification. man-in-middle attacks would not be detected and the user would not be alerted.
- the operating system is backdoored (gut and replace, push things to use space)
- multiple packages are backdoored at the build server (deterministic builds)
- the security auto-update mechanism is backdoored on almost every operating system (switch to linux, upgrade/replace system)
- almost every ASIC in every electronic device you have is backdoored.
- Your Apple wireless keyboard emits a 27 Mhz frequency and everything you type can be read from orbit. It may even be possible to root the computer over USB over radio. I am surprised no one has launched a satellite yet to steal Bitcoin deterministic wallet seeds.
- almost every device in your computer with firmware and DMA access has buffer overflows or backdoors (NIC card, GPU, sound card, bios, hard disc). If your hard disc firmware is backdoored you can replace the motherboard and you are still infected. If your bios is infected, data is exfiltrated even if you are running tails.
- Firewire and USB 3.0 allow DMA and allow you to overwrite the kernel (USB 3.0 exploit not confirmed yet). They allow ex filtration of disc encryption keys from ram. just plugging in firewire device is dangerous
- Many NIC controllers have backdoors and can suffer overflows from specifically crafted packets
- Every CPU (AMD and Intel) has microcode exploits. This allow sandbox breakout. If you run Bitcoin app on cloud computing where the computer is shared, they can break out of sandbox and loot your private keys. Some microcode exploit may be triggered by javascript or merely parsing a string.
- some intel CPUs can be rooted through CPU firmware updates over radio
- there is surveillance backdoors in every phone OS
- there back doors and surveillance software in many mobile analytic and advertising packages included in almost all mobile applications
- the baseboard of almost all cell phones is back doored and has several exploits
- California has mandated cell phone kill switches in all phones by law. These are implemented as on air firmware updates. During a protest police can ID all phones of people at the protest, root the phone, upload all the contact information and text messages from the phone, disable the cameras on the phone, delete audio, video and pictures on the phone from the protest, disable the internet on the phone and brick the phone or install surveillance software. They can do this sitting in a back office.
-- This system allows anyone's phone to be covertly backdoored at any time and is required by law in all phones globally as Apple/Google are located in CA. Police can stringray to collect phone IDs for persons at a protest and then later just install surveillance software on their phones in bulk. This is on top of the baseboard exploits and backdoors. FBI whining about disc encryption on iPhone crippling collection efforts is a lie.
-- the cell phone "kill switch" is really a remote firmware update and its in many laptops now also
- all consumer routers are backdoored.
- all routers are backdoored under CALEA and have additional backdoors or exploits
- HTTPS acceleration hardware used by companies like Facebook is backdoored to allow extraction of the privatekey. We should assume that under the FISA court, that all companies are required to secretly disclose their HTTPS/TLS private keys so that traffic can be decrypted.
- If your data is held by a third party (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Email) you have no expectation of privacy and a warrant is not required for collection. The data is public. Almost every communication service provider in the US has been ordered to give firehose access to the data, while the agencies pretend they dont have the data or only have metadata or need more data. The data is collected by government, managed by private companies and the worse programs are compartmentalized in contractors who are not bound by the procedures or restrictions of the government agencies.
- Courts are unable to perform enforcement on government employees. The laws do not apply to them. Courts cannot enforce the laws. A law saying a company does or does not need permission or a warrant is meaningless, because the laws cannot be enforced by courts. Assassination, BGB manipulation, bribing employees, threatening employees into implementing program at unwilling company without knowledge of management team, tapping fibers, hacking, jailing uncooperative CEOs for security fraud. There is nothing they are not allowed to do. If they can do it and get away with it, they are doing it.
- Congress does not appear to be aware of full scope of surveillance. The heads of the agencies involved do not appear to be aware. The programs are compartmentalized so no one has full oversight and everyone can individually deny they are doing it. The CEOs and management of the tech companies were not even away of the scope of participation of their companies in the programs.
- Your television, PS3 has microphones, is connected to the internet and is backdoored
- On-Star cars can have microphone turned on and car can also be hijacked remotely. Almost all fly by wire systems for automobiles are insecure and have local and remote hijack vulnerabilities.
- This list could go on for 3x longer.
There is a hierarchy of exploits. The less paper trail the better.
- passive automatically collected data (almost all of internet traffic) is first choice. this includes all emails, text messages, contact books, facebook posts, twitter posts, pictures, location data from cell phone. Websites visited, Google searchs. This is any non-encrypted communication, automatically collected. This is 99% of internet data.
- there are private databases for license plate readers, facial recognition, all credit cards transactions, finantial transactions. Account balances, websites visited. This is not-NSA. The non-NSA databases have more data and more useful data than the NSA intercept data. These are available to anyone with money.
- if private keys or SSH keys are needed to decrypt the data a publicly known exploit can automatically be run against target. There is a menu of exploits and its practically one click. This is deniable, does not need warrant. Attack can be launched from anywhere in world and will never be traced back to the private firm. "diodes". Each private firm has its own tool chain, their own software for probing the target, determining operating system, software packages and an exploitation framework like metasploit.
- There are law enforcement backdoors in everything. However, these leave paper trails, are not deniable and require warrants. That is why they also put in covert backdoors, software exploits and compromise protocols. These exploits work on foreign targets and no legal pretense is needed.
- rare, zero-day exploits are saved for high value targets with low technical ability. This is for high value military, technical and political targets. They lose value the more they are used. If an exploit is used against a honeypot server or technically advanced target, it might become useless.
- for some targets a warrant and then Apple remote firmware update is best.
- If the company can do this without talking to Apple (has private key for signing emergency updates and can impersonate update server, they will just do this automatically and dont need warrant or paper trail). Windows, OSX, iOS update signing keys, control of debian package build servers and signing keys, these are at a higher tier.
- highest tier are CPU microcode exploits, hardware level privilege escalation attacks that can be used to daisy chain through networks of hardened military targets.
The current situation in security, is that everything is privatized. The same firms that hack for the NSA or other government agencies, hack for the Fortune 500 and hack for third world dictators. They use the same methods, the same software, the same exploits. The NSA buys exploits in the same forums as everyone else. Almost everything is completely commodity.
The same firm who can deniably attack an organization for the NSA, will attack a Bitcoin exchange and loot 100 million in Bitcoin and it will never be detected or traced back to them. They will do anything that makes money that they wont be arrested for. Low level starts at target identifiers, network probing, metaploit. Attacking network without getting out of chair. Higher level includes infiltration, social engineering, competitive intelligence, tempest interception of wireless keyboards, bugging, bios rootkits. Example attack may include, spear fishing an employee, hacking their cell phone and then rooting computer when cell phone is plugged into laptop or computer on internal network to charge. Swapping out hardware for hardware with firmware back-doors.
The best exploits are in hardware. They are undetectable and can only be exploited by the person who created the exploit. For instance, if there is an integrated sound-card DSP on a motherboard and it has DMA access and a tiny coprocessor. Then you can backdoor it so that if a jingle plays on the sound card, then inject shell code or overwrite section of kernel. A sound could play on website (could be an ad from demand side platform targeted to you, that could appear on nearly any website on internet) and plays the sound and your computer is rooted. Your bitcoin wallet is gone.
You can ship motherboards with bios backdoors preinstalled. Graphics cards with firmware trojans that activate randomly after a month. Exploits on disc drive firmware. Network adapter firmware. Wifi cards, USB dongles. Apple's thunderbolt cable has twelve chips in it and has DMA.
Once a computer has been seized, you can install backdoors on all the firmware connected to the computer. Reinstalling the operating system, throwing out the disc drive and flashing the bios is not enough. You get reinfected because the GPU firmware is infected. Every USB thumb drive and cell phone that is plugged into the computer is also infected. This is possible today, but has not occurred yet.
This is the state of computer security. This is why over 1.5 billion in Bitcoin out of Bitcoin's current 3 billion dollar market cap has been stolen in the last year. This is why the theft will not end.
Bitcoin is only at 3 billion and has almost no users. If Bitcoin has 100 million users or was at a trillion dollars, with current computer security ... there would be people flying drones over cities rooting millions of cell phones, injecting shell commands over wireless keyboards, hihacking wifi sessions and injecting zero-day javscript exploits. People would be driving down the street in vans with antenna arrays to pick up EM emissions from SATA drives writing Bitcoin private keys to disc.
One of the people with the NSA key for signing windows updates, might hijack every windows computer in Europe to steal Bitcoin wallets. People would be putting remote execution exploits into every package, in every piece of software and keeping them instead of selling them.
So you can complain about Skycoin "reinventing the wheel" and "not being innovative", but I dont see how anything like Bitcoin can exist without being stolen in its current form. If you are a wallstreet HFT firm and you are trading a billion dollars a day in Bitcoin, how many days do you think you can keep the Bitcoin safe before they are stolen.
The future of the internetThe future of the internet is here and it is in China. China is ten years ahead of the rest of the world.
- every server requires a "real id" to register. You need a government ID number to rent a server.
- the government is shutting off the public address space. All ISPs have been ordered to NAT firewall users so that users cannot connect peer-to-peer. Users can only connect to government registered servers. Connects to non-government approved servers will automatically be dropped
- You cannot blog or chat without registering it to your government ID. Anonymous speech is dangerous.
- You must be registered with the government and receive a license to run an online service. The government can shut down the service if they withdrawal your license. Once your licence is revoked, users automatically become unable to connect to your servers.
- Domestic firms lobby the government to keep traffic and money inside the country. They begin slowing traffic down that leaves the country and charging users for traffic that leaves the country. You need a VPN to access content outside of the country. Services are required to keep all data for users in the country of the user and other laws that benefit large firms and hurt small companies who are unable to comply.
- encryption requires registration and government backdoors. You are not allowed any communication the government cannot read.
- the ISP has statefull packet inspection hardware and will IP block connections based upon what application you are running. Your not using government approved encryption. Blocked. You are not using a government approved protocol. Blocked. You are using VPN software. Blocked.
- when you say particular words on Skype that the government does not like, your call drops
I believe that ten years from now, China has a better prospect for internet freedom than the United States. It may be too late for the US, given the industry consolidation and absolute power the government and cartel wields.
Fighting Comcast/Time Warner, MPAA, RIAA, NSA and the cartel is like sticking your penis in a hornets nest. Its not worth being suicided over. Aaron Swartz would still be alive today if he had not challenged the government over its ridiculous paywall on court rulings. Michael Hastings was clearly warned multiple times and had it coming. It is very unrealistic to expect that once complete dominance of the financial system, all industry, government and all communications has been achieved, that this power would be given up willingly. Its not worth fighting for.
China is cracking down right now, but I believe in the long run the US internet will be more oppressive than the Chinese internet and the Chinese internet will be free.
The Road Forward Just as I was about to start the IPO, there was a remote execution exploit for linux that was publicly released and affected almost every system. A person could send you an email or anything that triggered a DNS query (possibly even from javascript) and your computer tries to resolve a hostname and your computer is now hijacked.
MtGox was written in PHP, here is a tutorial on hijacking PHP and taking control of a PHP server, "Finally, CVE-2014-8142 was found and patched, but not patched correctly, which lead to CVE-2015-0231"
http://www.inulledmyself.com/2015/02/exploiting-memory-corruption-bugs-in.htmlThis is exploit for taking over windows computer once remote execution is achieved. This allows you to flip one bit in the operating system in adobe and break out a sandbox (flash program, web browser) and hijack the machine. There are hundreds of exploits like this. The best exploits are sold and carefully hidden and exist for two to four years before they are fixed.
http://breakingmalware.com/vulnerabilities/one-bit-rule-bypassing-windows-10-protections-using-single-bit/Everyday there is another exploit that can hijack your computer and steal your Bitcoin. This exploit uses a regex in flash to get execution and potentially hijack your computer. Very little stops someone from taking an like this exploit and putting it into an advertisement and then run it on a website and hijack 40 million computers. If they targeted a site for Bitcoin users they could steal all the Bitcoin wallets or install software that patiently waits for users to unlock their wallets or put in their deterministic wallet seed
http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/02/exploitingscve-2015-0318sinsflash.htmlI cant rule out putting up the Skycoin bot and then five minute later someone looting all the coins with an exploit. It is impossible to rule out and it is almost certain that such an exploit exists. Instead of finding and fixing exploits like this, we need to determine the preconditions that rule them out. I do not believe that it is currently possible to store coins in an online wallet without them eventually being stolen.
- Choose a memory safe subset of LLVM IR. This should be the standard for executables and be flexible for compilation to a variety of new CPU/GPU architectures. Linux equivalent of Microsoft's CIL specification.
- Implement a virtual machine/emulator for a simplified x86/x64 instruction set that is memory safe.
- Prototyping new CPU architectures on FPGA, building simulators, testing framework and bench-marking (eventually, but first target is ARM, x64)
- Push as much out of the kernel as possible into user space.
- Create memory safe version of C and compile all of linux against it, with a new compiler. Must achieve deterministic builds.
- Achieve deterministic builds for all linux packages in debian with the above method. Without deterministic builds we cannot confirm that the build servers are not adding backdoors into packages.
- Moving away from monolithic computing architectures. CPU/RAM should be a unipro module. Sound card should be a unipro module. Networking card should be a unipro module. GPU should be unipro module. USB interface should be a unipro module. We need to compartmentalize hardware to avoid DMA and guarantee security of the platform even if individual chips or firmware is backdoored. The current CPU architecture allows firmware from the bios, hard disc, networking, graphics card or sound card or USB controller to overwrite the kernel with DMA access. this needs to end. This has added advantage of being able to just add more CPUs or GPU units by popping in more modules. The baseboards for unipro for ARA are almost here.
- the modules are also good because we can put them inside of block of aluminum to control tempest emissions and have immersion cooling.
The above is required for a secure computing platform. This is a two to four year project. Realistically fifteen years. I am not doing the coding, but know very good people who can staff some of the sub-projects. Writing C compiler and the LLVM virtual machine, I know someone who can do that very well.
This is ARA. This is unipro baseboard. This is also the target architecture for the Skywire meshnet hardware. You can pop a CPU in or out. Add a storage module or swap out a camera. The cell phone, tablet, laptop, server and desktop will end up on a modular platform like this. It will start with cell phones and servers first as these are already running on ARM. This is essentially the next generation of the blade server.
There is a common bus (unipro) that goes up to 20 Gb/s. It sends fixed length ATM packets. There is an FPGA in each module that ferries the data off the bus.
That is roughly what the next generation computing and server architecture will look like.
- Modular RAM, memory, CPU units on bus with communication by message passing on common bus or switched network
- blurring difference between CPU and GPU
- thousands or millions of cores, probably ARM at lower clock rate
- need for common language framework (LLVM IR type intermediate form) that can be compiled down to whichever achitecture is used in a computing unit (computing unit for matix operations or graphics, or computing unit without floating point operations, units with FPGAs)
- memory safety
- compartmentalization for security
Compartmentalization and pushing the kernel function to userspace is important, because you might have 500 units with 4 cores each and 2 GB of per board. You will want to be able to rent them out by the minute or hour, but want isolation. This type of modular server, can have power densities of 500 kW per rack with immersion cooling.
At the kernel and operating system level
- IP addresses have been replaced with public key hashes (skywire)
- no difference between local and remote storage.
- Content addressable file systems for some systems packages and things that need to quickly peer-to-peer replicated (Merkle-DAG)
- microkernels, millisecond bootup of docker style containerized applications
- applications can be stopped and moved between computers
- applications have seperate configuration and data folders and are modular packages suitable for replication
- applications only have access to resources they need. Other applications cannot reach into your bitcoin wallet folder. Applications choose which resources to expose to network (resource push and pull). Strict compartmentalization.
- users have a "personal cloud" of hundreds of devices. processors, laptops, tablets, desktops. The personal cloud consists of the resources the user controls or has access to. Disc storage, speakers, light bulbs, cpus, monitors, cnc machines. If a user adds a laptop to their cloud and uses the laptop, their applications are available automatically and their data is available across all devices. If a user plays a song on the laptop, they will have a choice of sound output resources (the laptop, the television, a pair of bluetooth speakers) to play the song over. All resources will be exposed to the network.
The hardware is commodity, the ARM processors are commodity, the ram is commodity, the bus standard is commodity. We dont really have to do anything because this type of hardware architecture is happening by itself right now. The ARA as a test board will be available in a few months
Security Preconditions for Secure Online Coin Storage
- we have to make sure we have deterministic builds (compiler, possibly new C variant)
- we have to make sure we have memory safety at language level (C compiler, requires new language)
- we have to make sure there is no undefined behavior (avoid problems in Bitcoin/C/C++ standard)
- we should aim for running debian, but initial ARA will be some Java Android OS
- we need to ensure that there is isolation between the modules. That one module if compromised is unable to root the other modules. A compromised sound card or network card should not be able to write into the CPU address space and hijack the kernel.
If those pre-conditions are met, then I would feel safe storing 100 million dollars in Skycoin in a live wallet. With power isolation and tempest shielding the security level becomes similar to physical gold. No future bug discoveries can loot the private keys or root the box over the network.
Until those conditions are met, hot wallets are wallets waiting to be stolen.
I was hesitant to do the pre-sale for such a low amount of equity for the investment, but given such a clear understanding by the developer of what is really going on and the threat it represents, I'll toss a few coins into it. It is very important that something like Skywire be implemented to put communications and data completely under the ownership and control of the users.
I want to avoid a future like Hunger Games and Elyssum.
