[NFD] MANDATORY Upgrade To NFD-1.2.6! New Features!

[Nxtblg]

After careful work and a lot of background testing, MaWo had completed a major upgrade to NFD! Most of it had been cloning work to keep up with NFD's parent coin Nxt, but there is an additional feature that did not come from NFD's parent. You'll find out what it is below.

There's also one major difference that means NFD will avoid a major controversy in the Nxt world about its security upgrade. It pertains only to accounts that have never had an outgoing transaction.

The way the Nxt system works, a new account that had not made an outgoing transaction is secured under the passphrase floor by 64-bit security. The strength of the passphrase itself doesn't affect this feature, as it applies to a hacker sneaking in under the floor and attacking an account via its address. Raw Nxt and NFD addresses are 64-bit: that's more-or-less the strength of an 11-character random password. Once the public key is announced to the blockchain, however, account security becomes much stronger. It ramps up to 256-bit, which makes the account effectively uncrackable underneath the password floor.

But there's a vulnerable point between the time a new account is funded and its first outgoing transaction.

According to Eadeqa in the Nxt forum, a hacker can do that by a "mix-and-match" approach:

If you don't have a public key, your Nxt can be stolen without cracking your password. It works like this:

(1) Generate a random curve25519 private key (no password needed)
(2) Create a public key for that private key
(3) Hash it and check if the first 64 bit match the accounts you want to crack (those  accounts don't have a public key).  

(note password has nothing to do with this)

Repeat these three steps 500 billion times a second (could be done if someone builds an ASIC) and you will be 19 million Nxt richer as you can steal all these Nxt with no public keys.

abuelau added another point, which explains why the vulnerability is even more worrying to the Nxt dev team:

What we are talking about here is someone sending nxt to a new account that had no pub key and therefore a hacker that had precomputed millions of private keys could be monitoring the network and steal the coins as soon as the deposit is made.

In a nutshell, this attack vector is why the Nxt dev team decided to make a new Nxt account announcing the public key to receive Nxt mandatory.

This decision got a lot of pushback, in part because it makes merchant services more difficult to code and breaks existing merchant code. Moreover, it's an added inconvenience for a new user who wants to fund his own account from an exchange buy. Nxt, as it is now, makes it mandatory for the receiver of a zero-outgoing-transaction account to add his public key before he'll get any Nxt.

Because MaWo read those complaints and decided it would be better if mandatory inconveniences weren't added to NFD, he had coded NFD-1.2.6 to make this safer but more inconvenient feature optional. If you want to be safe and don't mind the added inconvenience, you can add your public key to your NFD address to harden up your security until that first outgoing transaction. If you'd rather not go through this new step, you can choose to omit it.

Other New Features Of The New NFD:

- Like Nxt itself, NFD will have the Digital Goods Store. You can buy, sell, pay and rate digital goods through the new Store just as you can now with Nxt itself. This feature, along with the rest in this list, will not be available until Block 89,000. That block won't hit the blockchain for several days.
- Encrypted Messages, which will enable you to send notes to your fellow NFDers with the assurance that no blockchain snoops can read them. This feature has been cloned from Nxt, and is enabled by default. If you want a message to be public, just uncheck the checkbox.
- Fork Detection, which will give you a warning if your account has forged the last ten blocks - the usual footprint of getting stuck on a fork. Like the foregoing, this new feature has been cloned from Nxt.
- You'll be able to send an encrypted message to yourself! So you can write whatever note-to-self you please, and your notes will be far more secure than a teenage girl's secret diary. Again, this feature has been cloned from Nxt itself.
- Peer networking gzip compression, which will make downloading the NFD blockchain a speedier chore. Once again, this new feature in NFD has been cloned from Nxt.
- UPnP support. Although MaWo did not enable this feature by default, you can enable it easily; he'll be there to help you do it. This new feature is original; it was not cloned from Nxt.

Download Mandatory

You don't have to download the new client immediately, but you will have to have it by block 89,000! So please go to the downloads page of NFD's Bitbucket repository, download "nfd-client-NFD-1.2.6-20140908-A.zip" and unzip it. Then you're ready and waiting for block 89,000!

For More Information...

Feel free to ask anything in this thread or in the official NFDv2 announcement thread, where MaWo has supplied a full list of features in the new NFD.

Thanks!!

https://bter.com/trade/nfd_btc

[armcoin]

- UPnP support. Although MaWo did not enable this feature by default, you can enable it easily; he'll be there to help you do it. Smiley This new feature is original; it was not cloned from Nxt.

WOW, wonderful feature.

[Corleone1918]

2 sat 

[l8orre]

2 sat 

yes that seems a bit weird- it just shows that most people run after the hype and not do their own thinking and research.
In fact, NFD is a super cool entry to the NXT markets, because with NXT being poised to become extremely expensive, NFD can become a nice complement to NXT.

[Coinmin]

Thanks for the PM Nxtblg! Nice writen. Good work with new wallet.

PMed you about step-by-step method of security.

[Nerazzura]

thanks already contacted me, sir
we hope we together can make the NFD become very large. I'm sure it's slowly but surely

[NorrisK]

It always appears that the good honest coins are the ones with the lowest price...

I hope You are right about the sleeper status of NFD!

[capoeira]

2 sat 

yes that seems a bit weird- it just shows that most people run after the hype and not do their own thinking and research.
In fact, NFD is a super cool entry to the NXT markets, because with NXT being poised to become extremely expensive, NFD can become a nice complement to NXT.

fundamentaly NFD is extremly undervalued. So unless comunity doesn't give up, one day it'll rise

[seek4dream]

2 sat 

yes that seems a bit weird- it just shows that most people run after the hype and not do their own thinking and research.
In fact, NFD is a super cool entry to the NXT markets, because with NXT being poised to become extremely expensive, NFD can become a nice complement to NXT.

fundamentaly NFD is extremly undervalued. So unless comunity doesn't give up, one day it'll rise

+1. I have been accumulating NFD.

[Zhan21]

Develop very hard, but the market is not optimistic.

[Nxtblg]

2 sat 

yes that seems a bit weird- it just shows that most people run after the hype and not do their own thinking and research.
In fact, NFD is a super cool entry to the NXT markets, because with NXT being poised to become extremely expensive, NFD can become a nice complement to NXT.

fundamentaly NFD is extremly undervalued. So unless comunity doesn't give up, one day it'll rise

Also, most altcoins have been hit by a bear market. I hope the bear phase comes to an end soon.

[Kearney52]

  maybe price will go up

[lionheart78]

maybe price will go up

yeah this is the best time to buy nfd ^^ there is no doubt about price going up

[lionheart78]

[MaWo]

thanks for reporting, fixed

[seek4dream]

devs have been keeping working hard and active, the bottom price won't last long.

[Nxtblg]

devs have been keeping working hard and active, the bottom price won't last long.

Now that you mention it, I was surprised to see more than 75% of the sell wall at 2 satoshis snapped up just today.

https://bter.com/trade/nfd_btc

The wall was almost 2 BTC as of yesterday, but today it's little more than 0.3 BTC. 1.7 BTC vol in the last 24h, all at 2.

[capoeira]

well....i must repeat....price is there at 2 sats for months........but neither devs nor comunity has given up on it..........this is what is real value for a crypto coin....price will adjust to it....if not now, than later

[clat]

good news！

[Nxtblg]

Okay, just checked again at Bter. Unfortunately, the sell wall's mostly regenerated: it's now about 1.25 BTC's worth. Even though the 24hr vol has actually gone up to 2.1 BTC. Go figure.