[XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency

[smoothie]

(next fork in 8.7 hours)

So amazing that we can still just HF without a big drama. I am ready!

As time goes on and monero grows its user base hard forking will become more and more difficult.

Hence why it is so important to implement features like RingCT in January 2017 as opposed to waiting too long.

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[Hueristic]

Yeah and everyone was calling me an asshole for digging into the RPC. I warned you all it was a point of vulnerability and no-one would listen.

And we will do it again unless it's more than HYPOTHETICAL! RANDOM THOUGHT! WHAT IF!

Bullshit! I never got to my point because I wasn't getting the answers to my questions. Nice spin.

[Hueristic]

A statement on the MWR labs disclosure by the Monero core team

https://getmonero.org/2016/09/21/a-statement-on-the-mwr-labs-disclosure.html

Yeah and everyone was calling me an asshole for digging into the RPC. I warned you all it was a point of vulnerability and no-one would listen.

Please link to both:

1. Where someone was calling you an asshole

2. Where you pointed explicitly to it and spoke exactly about this particular vulnerability.

You have a search ability, I'm not wasting my time. That is the specific reason I was questioning what the vetting process of the new RPC and why I have been stating there is no reason for a fucking WRAPPER!!!! Losing the rpc on local wallets would have removed that vulnerability dammit. Why do you think I have been arguing to release a wallet with direct access and no middleware?

Here's one:

And I thought that this was replacing remote communication as well. Which is a VERY BIG DEAL. But after listening to the Podcast you linked I see that it is intended for interprocess communication currently but Fluffy did say it can be extended for wiring protocol replacement.

In terms of "dev notes", a lot of this stuff goes down on IRC in #monero-dev and sometimes even #monero. The bi-weekly dev meetings are the culmination of these discussions that span thousands of lines of text over many days.

Could you post those logs on pastebin?

0MQ is a trivial decision to make, because it's a backend change as you've observed. Our only option is either a messaging system (of which 0MQ is unequivocally the most battle-tested, with the largest number of implementations) or replacing the current HTTP server with something far more performant. Obviously, short of forking nginx, the latter is not really an option.

I don't quite understand why there needs to be any wrapper at all for local communication, why not use direct input and add the daemon functionality to say the gui? Is there any reason these need to be separate for end users? I just see this as a injection point where one doesn't need to be.

To speak to your other concern: we are definitely looking at replacing the wire protocol. Since we'll have 0MQ in already, and since we want to enable developers to build consensus-compatible implementations in whatever language they'd like, the logical choice is ZMTP (http://zmtp.org). This is, again, something that is battle-hardened and has implementations in tons of languages. Our other option is picking one of the Tor pluggable transports, something like obfs4, but that's somewhat less desirable for cross-implementation purposes.

I do remember this discussion being touched on in this thread I think but I don't remember a decision being announced. Making the product more accessible to a larger is base is laudable as I said I just want to make sure it is not at the cost of security. Especially with the vultures hovering looking for any attack vector they can find.

The current home-grown Boost::ASIO wire protocol is significantly more risky than switching to something that is standard. It's entirely possible that there's some weirdness under the hood that we haven't uncovered yet, so swapping it out for something that is well-known and widely used in FOSS projects is extremely desirable. Complexity is the enemy of good security, and in this case custom protocols way worse than well-known standards.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the wire protocol is hardly an attack surface. The major risk it represents is an MITM attack revealing what transactions you were the first to broadcast (mitigated by end-to-end encryption in ZMTP), and fingerprinting attacks being able to correlate your clearnet IP with your i2p address (mitigated by introducing some execution randomness to the i2p connectivity, and completely separating the information shared with nodes on both interfaces). Beyond that, a compromised or poisoned wire protocol won't be able to "do" anything particularly bad. The daemon has no idea what your private keys are. It has some information about your transactions you send out, and the ones you're interested in, but if it were revealing that it would be spotted very quickly.

This is actually my top concern, I want to see how this has been vetted. Call me paranoid but changing a core protocol with off hand remarks is worrisome and I just want to verify that we are not just taking anyone's word on the fact that the crypto in 0MQ is sound and safe when it comes to a currency that cannot be checked for manipulation.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backdoor-in-rsas-cryptography-a-technical-primer/

BTW we are very close to losing beta status correct? How long will this be tested within the beta phase?

I don't know anything about this so I wanted to see a peer review or a word from our scientists that they have verified this is bulletproof.
Looking into ZeroMq I see it uses Curve25519 correct?

http://zeromq.org/topics:encryption

ZeroMQ 4.x has extensible encryption, and comes with CurveZMQ as a built-in security mechanism. Pieter Hintjens has some articles that explain how this works. The only extra dependency is libsodium, which provides the Curve25519 security functions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ms5fu/new_zeromq_4_does_strong_encryption_and_perfect/

CURVE - secure authentication and encryption based on elliptic curve cryptography, using the Curve25519 algorithm from Daniel Bernstein and based on CurveCP's security handshake. See http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:25, http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:26, and http://curvecp.org.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve25519

    I no longer trust the constants. I believe the NSA has manipulated them through their relationships with industry
    — Bruce Schneier, The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet (2013)

***********************************************************************************************************

Will Monero pitch to Anchor into Factom blockchain after they do Ethereum?


Ethereum is for smart contracts Factom is for data and Dash or Monero is for privacy.

Actually I don't know who's better between Dash or Monero and I know there is heated debate about this so not opening that pandoras box because I don't have a horse in the race. Anyway both are experimental technologies in field worthy of pursuit.

Well just looking at XMR's rich list should tell you something.
http://moneroblocks.info/richlist

It could be worse, but there's a hint of smugness to the writing on that page.

As there should be, this project is headed by some of the smartest and capable people I've ever seen, they are so advanced they take for granted that we as a community know the things I ask in this thread. I feel like the kid in class that asked the question because others are lost and afraid to. Not to say I don't get lost, my brain is on life support these days. Lol

This project gets the hardest scrutiny and has never to my knowledge lied, misled or deceived the community, how many other ones can you say that about?

Still waiting on a reply here.

[fluffypony]

You have a search ability, I'm not wasting my time. That is the specific reason I was questioning what the vetting process of the new RPC and why I have been stating there is no reason for a fucking WRAPPER!!!! Losing the rpc on local wallets would have removed that vulnerability dammit. Why do you think I have been arguing to release a wallet with direct access and no middleware?

What does "direct access" mean? If you mean libwallet_api, well that's precisely what Ilya has been building out, so that conversation is pointless.

As to "new RPC" there is no new RPC. There is a new IPC, which would have made this problem irrelevant, but tewinget simply didn't finish enough of it in time for the 0.10.0 release.

Local wallets are not at risk, unless you choose to allow remote access, which may lead to remote access (basically what that disclosure highlights).

[smoothie]

Yeah and everyone was calling me an asshole for digging into the RPC. I warned you all it was a point of vulnerability and no-one would listen.

And we will do it again unless it's more than HYPOTHETICAL! RANDOM THOUGHT! WHAT IF!

Bullshit! I never got to my point because I wasn't getting the answers to my questions. Nice spin.

You could have just made your point. Kind of hard to make an argument (of making a point), when your point hinges on someone's response. If you have a point, make it, otherwise it is all supposition.

[smoothie]

A statement on the MWR labs disclosure by the Monero core team

https://getmonero.org/2016/09/21/a-statement-on-the-mwr-labs-disclosure.html

Yeah and everyone was calling me an asshole for digging into the RPC. I warned you all it was a point of vulnerability and no-one would listen.

Please link to both:

1. Where someone was calling you an asshole

2. Where you pointed explicitly to it and spoke exactly about this particular vulnerability.

You have a search ability, I'm not wasting my time. That is the specific reason I was questioning what the vetting process of the new RPC and why I have been stating there is no reason for a fucking WRAPPER!!!! Losing the rpc on local wallets would have removed that vulnerability dammit. Why do you think I have been arguing to release a wallet with direct access and no middleware?

Here's one:

And I thought that this was replacing remote communication as well. Which is a VERY BIG DEAL. But after listening to the Podcast you linked I see that it is intended for interprocess communication currently but Fluffy did say it can be extended for wiring protocol replacement.

In terms of "dev notes", a lot of this stuff goes down on IRC in #monero-dev and sometimes even #monero. The bi-weekly dev meetings are the culmination of these discussions that span thousands of lines of text over many days.

Could you post those logs on pastebin?

0MQ is a trivial decision to make, because it's a backend change as you've observed. Our only option is either a messaging system (of which 0MQ is unequivocally the most battle-tested, with the largest number of implementations) or replacing the current HTTP server with something far more performant. Obviously, short of forking nginx, the latter is not really an option.

I don't quite understand why there needs to be any wrapper at all for local communication, why not use direct input and add the daemon functionality to say the gui? Is there any reason these need to be separate for end users? I just see this as a injection point where one doesn't need to be.

To speak to your other concern: we are definitely looking at replacing the wire protocol. Since we'll have 0MQ in already, and since we want to enable developers to build consensus-compatible implementations in whatever language they'd like, the logical choice is ZMTP (http://zmtp.org). This is, again, something that is battle-hardened and has implementations in tons of languages. Our other option is picking one of the Tor pluggable transports, something like obfs4, but that's somewhat less desirable for cross-implementation purposes.

I do remember this discussion being touched on in this thread I think but I don't remember a decision being announced. Making the product more accessible to a larger is base is laudable as I said I just want to make sure it is not at the cost of security. Especially with the vultures hovering looking for any attack vector they can find.

The current home-grown Boost::ASIO wire protocol is significantly more risky than switching to something that is standard. It's entirely possible that there's some weirdness under the hood that we haven't uncovered yet, so swapping it out for something that is well-known and widely used in FOSS projects is extremely desirable. Complexity is the enemy of good security, and in this case custom protocols way worse than well-known standards.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the wire protocol is hardly an attack surface. The major risk it represents is an MITM attack revealing what transactions you were the first to broadcast (mitigated by end-to-end encryption in ZMTP), and fingerprinting attacks being able to correlate your clearnet IP with your i2p address (mitigated by introducing some execution randomness to the i2p connectivity, and completely separating the information shared with nodes on both interfaces). Beyond that, a compromised or poisoned wire protocol won't be able to "do" anything particularly bad. The daemon has no idea what your private keys are. It has some information about your transactions you send out, and the ones you're interested in, but if it were revealing that it would be spotted very quickly.

This is actually my top concern, I want to see how this has been vetted. Call me paranoid but changing a core protocol with off hand remarks is worrisome and I just want to verify that we are not just taking anyone's word on the fact that the crypto in 0MQ is sound and safe when it comes to a currency that cannot be checked for manipulation.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backdoor-in-rsas-cryptography-a-technical-primer/

BTW we are very close to losing beta status correct? How long will this be tested within the beta phase?

I don't know anything about this so I wanted to see a peer review or a word from our scientists that they have verified this is bulletproof.
Looking into ZeroMq I see it uses Curve25519 correct?

http://zeromq.org/topics:encryption

ZeroMQ 4.x has extensible encryption, and comes with CurveZMQ as a built-in security mechanism. Pieter Hintjens has some articles that explain how this works. The only extra dependency is libsodium, which provides the Curve25519 security functions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ms5fu/new_zeromq_4_does_strong_encryption_and_perfect/

CURVE - secure authentication and encryption based on elliptic curve cryptography, using the Curve25519 algorithm from Daniel Bernstein and based on CurveCP's security handshake. See http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:25, http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:26, and http://curvecp.org.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve25519

    I no longer trust the constants. I believe the NSA has manipulated them through their relationships with industry
    — Bruce Schneier, The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet (2013)

***********************************************************************************************************

Will Monero pitch to Anchor into Factom blockchain after they do Ethereum?


Ethereum is for smart contracts Factom is for data and Dash or Monero is for privacy.

Actually I don't know who's better between Dash or Monero and I know there is heated debate about this so not opening that pandoras box because I don't have a horse in the race. Anyway both are experimental technologies in field worthy of pursuit.

Well just looking at XMR's rich list should tell you something.
http://moneroblocks.info/richlist

It could be worse, but there's a hint of smugness to the writing on that page.

As there should be, this project is headed by some of the smartest and capable people I've ever seen, they are so advanced they take for granted that we as a community know the things I ask in this thread. I feel like the kid in class that asked the question because others are lost and afraid to. Not to say I don't get lost, my brain is on life support these days. Lol

This project gets the hardest scrutiny and has never to my knowledge lied, misled or deceived the community, how many other ones can you say that about?

Still waiting on a reply here.

Perhaps you need to calm down a bit.

Go outside, get some fresh air, etc.

I was asking nicely, so I don't appreciate the hostile response, although it doesn't offend me, I do think it is over the top and inappropriate. Let's all act like adults please.

Thanks for the link, reading it now...

[Hueristic]

Sorry guys, I'm not sure why I felt so deeply about this. I'm not even invested it doesn't even effect me. It's just that I spent alot of hours trying to vet that and felt I was roadblocked and now it has come to pass. Whatever. I hope no-one lost money because of this.

I did go out and calmed down sorry for the rough language smoothie. I just took a pain pill and the news hit me in the wrong way.

[nioc]

On the lighter side I bought a new comp.  It's an interim comp good enough so it won't crap out anytime soon but bad enough that I will still keep dreaming.

Thanks to all that gave advice

[owlcatz]

On the lighter side I bought a new comp.  It's an interim comp good enough so it won't crap out anytime soon but bad enough that I will still keep dreaming.

Thanks to all that gave advice

I'm thinking of buying a cool Phantom 4 drone! Profit FTW!!!  and yes, wrong thread i know! 

BTW, when is the HF again?

[Hueristic]

On the lighter side I bought a new comp.  It's an interim comp good enough so it won't crap out anytime soon but bad enough that I will still keep dreaming.

Thanks to all that gave advice

Link it.

[Drhiggins]

I just want to reflect to all that I see a community here that cares.  Even if we get heated sometimes people care enough to post concerns whether it be the RPC thing or other issues effecting Monero.

To me the passion some of us show means we care.  So to this I think I'm going to have a good old Kentucky Bourbon and celebrate where Monero has come since I started following in July of 2014.

 

[owlcatz]

I just want to reflect to all that I see a community here that cares.  Even if we get heated sometimes people care enough to post concerns whether it be the RPC thing or other issues effecting Monero.

To me the passion some of us show means we care.  So to this I think I'm going to have a good old Kentucky Bourbon and celebrate where Monero has come since I started following in July of 2014.

 

Already drinking to that, thank you sir, well said!

[hyc]

Just for fun - hardfork countdown contest - try to send a transaction that lands in the hardfork block, win a prize.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/53wou2/monero_hardfork_countdown_contest/

[Drhiggins]

So do we need to do anything for the hard fork here in 5 hours on the common user end?   Running Wolfram now so just wondering.

[owlcatz]

So do we need to do anything for the hard fork here in 5 hours on the common user end?   Running Wolfram now so just wondering.

Nope. 

[Anon136]

Just for fun - hardfork countdown contest - try to send a transaction that lands in the hardfork block, win a prize.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/53wou2/monero_hardfork_countdown_contest/

Cute but other people have to store those transactions for all eternity.

[Hueristic]

I just want to reflect to all that I see a community here that cares.  Even if we get heated sometimes people care enough to post concerns whether it be the RPC thing or other issues effecting Monero.

To me the passion some of us show means we care.  So to this I think I'm going to have a good old Kentucky Bourbon and celebrate where Monero has come since I started following in July of 2014.

 

Hmm img didn't work. http://www.npr.org/assets/img/2016/03/17/McCloy_Cheers.gif


Just noticed, Still --> "Doomed to see the future and unable to prevent it" Lol

[hyc]

Just for fun - hardfork countdown contest - try to send a transaction that lands in the hardfork block, win a prize.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/53wou2/monero_hardfork_countdown_contest/

Cute but other people have to store those transactions for all eternity.

Y'know, I just shrank the blockchain by 50% in v0.10. I think we can afford to splurge a bit here.

[cAPSLOCK]

Just for fun - hardfork countdown contest - try to send a transaction that lands in the hardfork block, win a prize.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/53wou2/monero_hardfork_countdown_contest/

Cute but other people have to store those transactions for all eternity.

Y'know, I just shrank the blockchain by 50% in v0.10. I think we can afford to splurge a bit here.

Nice job BTW...

[Anon136]

Just for fun - hardfork countdown contest - try to send a transaction that lands in the hardfork block, win a prize.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/53wou2/monero_hardfork_countdown_contest/

Cute but other people have to store those transactions for all eternity.

Y'know, I just shrank the blockchain by 50% in v0.10. I think we can afford to splurge a bit here.

I was just saying to my wife. I don't think I have ever seen a blockchain shrink since I've been involved in crypto. It's like this thing everyone always talks about but no one ever sees. It's a unicorn and here it is in monero, re-affirming why I am so heavily invested in this amazing project. You sir are a legend.