Uploading virus signature to the blockchain

[Automatic]

Imagine anti-virus A detects "0xAABBCCDEEFF" as a virus, okay? I submit a transaction which has the script, simply:-

Code:

0xAABBCCDDEEFF OP_DUP OP_EQUALVERIFY

At this point, basically, you're sending "0xAABBCCDDEEFF" to the mempool, duplicating it (OP_DUP), testing if 0xAABBCCDDEEFF and itself (OP_DUP) are the same, if so, the transaction is valid.

So, now it's a valid transaction, it'll be mined, and, it'll be put into the blockchain, this is where issues occur, suddenly, everybody who is running that anti-virus suddenly gets a warning, and, their antivirus starts quarantining the blockchain!

What's to stop this from occurring? It may cost an attacker a mBTC or so to actually pay for a transaction with a virus binary attached to it (As it'll probably be a few tens of KB), but, until the anti-virus vendor manually marks the blockchain as not a virus, surely it'll show up in a scan-time scan (And maybe even runtime, as, Bitcoin-QT will have "0xAABBCCDDEEFF" in memory).

[thecoinjournal]

Maybe this should be posted on the technical board?https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0

[InsanityDev]

this is an old theory.

if one can inject a virus signature in to the bitcoin blocks which are distributed, theoretically you can get antivirus software to remove a large chunk of the nodes online, reducing the distribution of the network and perhaps making a 51% more feasible. It's been discussed for years.

realistically, mining has become quite centralized at major pools with specialized hardware, the real world impact of such an attempt would be little more than a minor annoyance for some non technical users, and be of no gain to anybody.

[Automatic]

this is an old theory.

if one can inject a virus signature in to the bitcoin blocks which are distributed, theoretically you can get antivirus software to remove a large chunk of the nodes online, reducing the distribution of the network and perhaps making a 51% more feasible. It's been discussed for years.

realistically, mining has become quite centralized at major pools with specialized hardware, the real world impact of such an attempt would be little more than a minor annoyance for some non technical users, and be of no gain to anybody.

Can I ask how mining being centralized changes anything? The attack is still just as valid, include a detected signature in a valid transaction, and, it'll be mined by miners (Other than yourself).

[InsanityDev]

this is an old theory.

if one can inject a virus signature in to the bitcoin blocks which are distributed, theoretically you can get antivirus software to remove a large chunk of the nodes online, reducing the distribution of the network and perhaps making a 51% more feasible. It's been discussed for years.

realistically, mining has become quite centralized at major pools with specialized hardware, the real world impact of such an attempt would be little more than a minor annoyance for some non technical users, and be of no gain to anybody.

Can I ask how mining being centralized changes anything? The attack is still just as valid, include a detected signature in a valid transaction, and, it'll be mined by miners (Other than yourself).

To 51% you need to reduce the computing power of the network. Most mining is on pools, where the coind's are on linux, and the mining is via stratum. Thus if anybody does this they won't reduce the computing power of the network, they'll just make it awkward for a few non-mining end users. Think about it, miners don't even see the block chain they see stratum jobs, midstates and the like, and hash those.. CPU wallets don't mine on bitcoin - GPUs kind of do, and ASICs do, via pools.

This perhaps would have a chance to make things a little tricky on a CPU only mined coin with lots of people mining on windows clients (quark and clones), but anything gpu/asic based it just won't affect.

[bitpop]

Many big nodes are on linux so itll be fine