Security update: duplicate transaction vulnerability fix

[Daily Anarchist]

All of this technical stuff is way over my head, but I'd like to share my ignorant thoughts anyways.

It seems to me that 8 days is not enough time for people to really do their research on the matter. If I were a miner, or the operator of a mining pool, I would want to know EXACTLY what I'm doing before I made any serious changes.

Secondly, even if 8 days is enough time there is something unsettling about this. What you essentially have is a few highly skilled coders in the know. If they can dupe the mining community into something, anything, nefarious it could destroy Bitcoin. Obviously, I'm not saying that they will, but posit this:

Imagine highly skilled feds, or any other criminal organization, infiltrated the upper echelon of Bitcoin coders. They spent long hours making it better and building a reputation for themselves, slowly but surely dominating the entire field of coders. Then, one day, it's time to destroy Bitcoin and they issue some sort of scenario similar to the one we're dealing with now, for the mining community to go to a new blockchain or something, and the mining community takes their word for it, and BAM, Bitcoin is hashed forever.

I understand this is conspiracy theory stuff, but can anyone unsettle my fears about this scenario?

Simple. As long as the process is completely transparent and open there's really nothing anyone could "sneak" past everyone else in order to cause damage. And if you checked the OP, it pretty much doesn't get any more transparent then how they're going about with this fix. I mean you can even read the mailing list how the devs formulated the fix..

Two more questions then:

Is 8 days really enough time to vet a potentially nefarious plan?

What if a few people DO see something nefarious in it, will they be listened to, or ignored?

Also (all?) of the coders are known by real name. If they f*ckup bitcoin, they will be known by everyone as the person who screwed things up.
That would be the same as destroying many peoples money, and time invested and many companies and that is not like something you would like to do, ofcourse there is allways the possibility that they are threatened by jail or whatever unless they do this. But in this case its far from very likely.

I don't see very much as unlikely when you're talking about challenging the global banking cartel.

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[casascius]

A technical question - why the patch does not simply discard the block with the duplicate hash, regardless of its contents?

My guess is because of duplicate transactions already on the block chain.  Discarding the old blocks would discard half the block chain and half of the bitcoins in existence with it.

[Atheros]

For all the paranoid people, here is the patch for everyone to read. The red lines came out and the green lines were added.

https://github.com/sipa/bitcoin/commit/a206b0ea12eb4606b93323268fc81a4f1f952531

[Pieter Wuille]

A technical question - why the patch does not simply discard the block with the duplicate hash, regardless of its contents?

That is basically what happens: a block with a duplicate transaction will become invalid, and thus will be ignored.

EDIT: obviously, this does not happen to blocks with existing duplicate transactions, as that would require invalidating the entire chain since then.

@casascius: you are right that technically a specification is needed for what to do with duplicate transactions in blocks before the switchover point. However, there is no formal specification of bitcoin's network rules currently either (only the code...), and the BIP only specifies the changes to the current rules. The current rules are: the transaction index is overwritten for a duplicate transaction, and a reorganisation removes the relevant transaction index entries.

[Hawkix]

A technical question - why the patch does not simply discard the block with the duplicate hash, regardless of its contents?

That is basically what happens: a block with a duplicate transaction will become invalid, and thus will be ignored.

EDIT: obviously, this does not happen to blocks with existing duplicate transactions, as that would require invalidating the entire chain since then.

I understand the "IF NEWER THAN SOMEDATE" in code, this is to prevent invalidating the entire chain since when first duplicate transaction appeared.

But, with this date switch implemented, why to check for spent/unspent transactions, instead of simply comparing the hash against all previous (just for blocks after the switch)?

[kjj]

A technical question - why the patch does not simply discard the block with the duplicate hash, regardless of its contents?

That is basically what happens: a block with a duplicate transaction will become invalid, and thus will be ignored.

EDIT: obviously, this does not happen to blocks with existing duplicate transactions, as that would require invalidating the entire chain since then.

I understand the "IF NEWER THAN SOMEDATE" in code, this is to prevent invalidating the entire chain since when first duplicate transaction appeared.

But, with this date switch implemented, why to check for spent/unspent transactions, instead of simply comparing the hash against all previous (just for blocks after the switch)?

It has been known for quite a while that a new coinbase with the same hash as an old coinbase was possible and not handled at all.  But since they are referenced by their (identical) hashes, there was no way to specify which one you meant to redeem, so redeeming one would redeem all of them.  This is not in any way a security problem, and can only be used to lose money.  There are faster and easier ways to lose money.

What was only recently discovered was that if you spend a coinbase, and then generate another identical one, you can then spend the second one too.  Spending a transaction doesn't mark that hash invalid for all time, it just removes it from the list of unspent transactions.  Another one can show up and be accepted.  This is, again, not a security problem, and doesn't, by itself, make it possible for people to lose coins unintentionally.

The list of all used transactions isn't readily available, and once pruning shows up, it might not even exist at all.  So, it only makes sense to compare the new coinbase to the list of transaction hashes that are unspent at the time, which aren't subject to pruning.  This also preserves the old behavior of being able to generate and spend multiple identical coinbases, so long as they are spent before the next one shows up.  And finally, it gives us a really short and simple patch, that anyone can read and understand without having to worry that a new side effect has snuck in.

[Hawkix]

Nice explained. Thanks!

[eleuthria]

This thread really needs to be more visible:  Perhaps a giant bold red link at the top of the forum?

BTC Guild will be pushing the patch tomorrow, and my understanding is both Slush & Deepbit will be shortly as well, which means the chain will have majority support.  That doesn't solve the problem of the other 30-40% of bitcoin miners that may not even know about the issue due to lack of visibility.

[Pieter Wuille]

BTC Guild will be pushing the patch tomorrow, and my understanding is both Slush & Deepbit will be shortly as well, which means the chain will have majority support.  That doesn't solve the problem of the other 30-40% of bitcoin miners that may not even know about the issue due to lack of visibility.

I have updated the second post with a list of pools from whom I have received confirmation they will update. I will keep that list up-to-date as I receive more confirmations.

[hazek]

Maybe the person who owns http://bitcoinwatch.com/ could post this thread in the "Latest news" section of their website?

[cypherdoc]

IMO, you haven't made clear whether or not ALL users, or just miners, NEED to upgrade to 0.6 to facilitate/support this transition!

edit: by "support" you mean upgrade to 0.6?

[Pieter Wuille]

IMO, you haven't made clear whether or not all users NEED to upgrade to 0.6 to facilitate/support this transition!

edit: by "support" you mean upgrade to 0.6?

Support was meant in a general sense: such a network rule change can only happen when the community agrees to it.

If you are a miner or pool operator: yes, please upgrade quickly, as the higher the percentage enforcing the new rules, the less chance for (temporary and short) block chain splits one could try to create.

Apart from that, if all goes well, eventually everyone will upgrade, but as a normal user, there is relatively little risk in keeping an old version. The more people running a version that enforces the new rule, the smaller the effects of an attacker can be. 0.6.0 will still take some time to be released, but there will be a bugfix-only 0.5.3 soon.

[cypherdoc]

IMO, you haven't made clear whether or not all users NEED to upgrade to 0.6 to facilitate/support this transition!

edit: by "support" you mean upgrade to 0.6?

Support was meant in a general sense: such a network rule change can only happen when the community agrees to it.

If you are a miner or pool operator: yes, please upgrade quickly, as the higher the percentage enforcing the new rules, the less chance for (temporary and short) block chain splits one could try to create.

Apart from that, if all goes well, eventually everyone will upgrade, but as a normal user, there is relatively little risk in keeping an old version. The more people running a version that enforces the new rule, the smaller the effects of an attacker can be. 0.6.0 will still take some time to be released, but there will be a bugfix-only 0.5.3 soon.

thats a little better.  let me repeat and if i'm wrong please correct:

Anyone who mines needs to upgrade to 0.5.3 as soon as it comes out to minimize the chances of a blockchain fork.

i'm not trolling; seriously it needs to be spelled out.

[Hawkix]

Is there an official Bitcoin.org Twitter account? This would be great place to post notifications, warning, new version release, and so on.

[finway]

Glad to see you guys killing this annoying bug.

[Wandering Albatross]

All of this technical stuff is way over my head, but I'd like to share my ignorant thoughts anyways.

It seems to me that 8 days is not enough time for people to really do their research on the matter. If I were a miner, or the operator of a mining pool, I would want to know EXACTLY what I'm doing before I made any serious changes.

Secondly, even if 8 days is enough time there is something unsettling about this. What you essentially have is a few highly skilled coders in the know. If they can dupe the mining community into something, anything, nefarious it could destroy Bitcoin. Obviously, I'm not saying that they will, but posit this:

Imagine highly skilled feds, or any other criminal organization, infiltrated the upper echelon of Bitcoin coders. They spent long hours making it better and building a reputation for themselves, slowly but surely dominating the entire field of coders. Then, one day, it's time to destroy Bitcoin and they issue some sort of scenario similar to the one we're dealing with now, for the mining community to go to a new blockchain or something, and the mining community takes their word for it, and BAM, Bitcoin is hashed forever.

I understand this is conspiracy theory stuff, but can anyone unsettle my fears about this scenario?

You might as well throw out the label  "conspiracy theory".  History, long past, and recent, has shown that discerning minds often reveal the truths behind events. So don't let lesser minds diminish accurate perception.
What inspired BTC? Bored geeks?  Current world events?

Recall the debian ssl "issue". It can happen here too. What did the spooks talk about with Andresen when he went to visit them?
Oh and have a look at github notification about recent security breach.  Isn't bitcoin code stored there?
The question is not if but when. The spooks always have a control point. They don't rest until they do and even then they hedge because that's the game.

[Wandering Albatross]

Did you all choose sf.net for mailing list because no one likes it? I'm not clear on the technical details of this but from a higher-level view it seems that the devs should, if not already, think about how to push updates out.  i.e. decentralize the software

I'm not sure how to do what I'm getting at but having everyone update, in the way that's needed to implement this change, isn't going to scale into the future.
Has this been discussed already? Some kind of enforcement that would prevent unsupported software access to the network? Am I making any sense at all?

I realize pushing updates out automatically would be unpopular so another model would be needed. Not sure what model would work.

[kjj]

Did you all choose sf.net for mailing list because no one likes it? I'm not clear on the technical details of this but from a higher-level view it seems that the devs should, if not already, think about how to push updates out.  i.e. decentralize the software

I'm not sure how to do what I'm getting at but having everyone update, in the way that's needed to implement this change, isn't going to scale into the future.
Has this been discussed already? Some kind of enforcement that would prevent unsupported software access to the network? Am I making any sense at all?

I realize pushing updates out automatically would be unpopular so another model would be needed. Not sure what model would work.

The people that need to update to make the change stick network-wide are already aware of this, and have committed to updating their nodes.  See the second post.

The way this has been handled is appropriate for the problem at hand and the network of today.  When either of those are different, different methods will be (have been) used to update things.

Getting more than half of the hashing power onboard is all that is needed for this fix, and that is already done.  The fix does open a tiny sliver of a window of vulnerability where people who are doing things that they know they should not be doing might be at a slight risk if an attacker expends great effort for no gain.

The people that want to eliminate that tiny risk and keep being irresponsible have the option to upgrade.

Also, from your other (crazier) post, github has a copy of the bitcoin source, but the developers collectively have the bitcoin source.

[cypherdoc]

+1 LOL!

[ribuck]

It seems to me that 8 days is not enough time ...

Anyone who can't satisfy themselves about this change in an hour or two isn't trying.