this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
100 points (94.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35726 readers
1128 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like "Odyssey" and "lbry" appearing and being "based on the blockchain", my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what's the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn't be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don't have?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So we can’t trust hardware wallets then. Isn’t that… a problem? Something that needs to be solved?

yup, huge one, something I have sat across the table from the engineers of some of the leading hardware wallet companies and asking them to address. so far what I see are a bunch of companies lining up to say "trust me bro", I look forward to better options though I suspect that no matter how you cut it, due to people wanting convince it will still be you trusting someone, its just a question of how tight your grip on thier throat is. or you go techno-hermit and build your own kit if you really need something digital.

Why do you trust that cold wallet? Are you sure they didn’t leak the key somehow? We’ve already established that there’s no trust or reason to trust them.

Its a physical set of steel discs with the key encoded on them, locked in a safe with a copy locked in an off-location safe. they leak about as much as one might expect things in your safe might leak. do you control these places? I often think about systems like this looking top provide tiers of control and ownership, you own your accounts legally, physically AND technically. a data breech at a bank using this system drains only the banks accounts, yours are fine (assuming a correct fail-safe desgin)

If I were a cryptocoin blackhat, I’d sell a bunch of broken RNGs to the idiotic cold-wallet people and slowly steal money from them over the next 20 years. Its like the easiest steal ever, the entire crytpocoin community is completely blind to how fucking stupid they are.

You should get on that, I'm sure it will work really well, you realize there have been people working on satoshi's cold wallets for over a decade? When this cryptography breaks it will be an advance in quantum tech and we will all be boned.

Are you sure that those people who think they’ve “forgotten their passphrase” really forgot their passphrase? What if its the cold-wallet that betrayed them?

Wow, a band of rng guessing thieves only targeting wallets that have been lost by those who would reasonably believe they forgot or lost access to thier key, this sounds like a script hollywood will need in its new AI future!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

hmac(passphrase, "one") -> seed used to create the private key.

Its so god damn simple man. Passphrase is the key. Standardize the solution so that when Hmac(passphrase, 'one') emits the same private key on two separate devices, we know that their code is legitimate. Run tests on commercial solutions to make sure they emit the standard answer to a set of publicly known private-keys (as well as a few personal tests to ensure it works on your end) and bam, problem solved.

You're telling me that all the best cryptocoin wallet peeps can't come up with a college-textbook answer like that?

As other keys are needed, use hmac(passphrase, "two") and hmac(passphrase, "three"), etc. etc.


No. The answer is that no one is really trying to solve the info-sec issue with regards to cryptocoin. Its just a money game to them. There's elementary / college-level solutions that are in the front of any textbook (or maybe left as an exercise, that you'd find at the back of the book / answer key).

When the level of cryptography knowledge is this primitive, I know that the entire damn community ain't serious about it and I shouldn't waste my time with them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

thats how it works, im not sure what you are getting at?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Oh really, wallet hardware companies are publishing the hmac and algorithm used to go from passphrase to private key?

Care to post one?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

there are opensource wallets, the standard is called BIP39

im not sure if any of the hardware providers are doing it though

im still not sure what you are getting at, if you are suggesting I somehow trust hardware cold wallet providers, I dont, does not mean Im not stuck using the tools.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

if you are suggesting I somehow trust hardware cold wallet providers, I dont

I'm saying there's an obvious solution to anyone who has passed a cryptography 101 course here.

PKI private keys are randomly generated prime numbers and/or ellipitcal curve numbers (depending on algorithm). Either way, that random number generator needs a seed, and that seed can be based off of the passphrase. BIP39 isn't the whole solution, that's just a way to turn long-strings of alpha-numeric characters into binary data.

My overall point is that there's a blatantly obvious, simple solution to the hardware wallet problem. I brought it up because its not a hard crypto-problem to solve. The fact that there's no adequate solution in 15 years is a failure of the cryptocoin community. Not due to a failure of basic cryptography problems.


The cryptocoin community, despite using "cryptography" is a joke. They barely know how to use cryptography even at its most elementary levels. It takes 15 years to come up with crappy, untrusted hardware wallets and they still can't open a basic textbook to come up with a better solution that's already written down.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the issue with the hardware wallet is not a "simple math" problem but a "trust" issue. in reality you simply can't trust any hardware you didn't make yourself, in practical use we usually pick vendors we like and decide to trust them.

for example. many people considered ledger trustworthy until they introduced firmware that indicates a capability to exfiltrate the keys.

I think the problem you are speaking to was some older hardware keys (and maybe some strange off brands) that encode keys at the factory, to my knowledge no major product does anything like that and they take pains to show you are generating the key. the big back and forth there has been with hardware providers using methods that are potentially reversible or other types of vulnerabilities.

Yes pretty much all devices will allow you to import a key you have generated by whatever means you prefer, however once you put it on the device you are signing up for the other issues that come with hardware still.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't think you recognize how easy it is to generate trust with the methodology I laid out.

  1. Buy a standard-compliant offline wallet.
  2. Buy a second, standard-compliant, offline wallet that you know uses a different codebase, as much as possible.
  3. Generate a passphrase. Use it on #1 and #2 to generate your wallet/private keys.
  4. Is it the same private key? Success. Unless the wallets have fallen prey to the same flaw (unlikely, as they were manufactured from two separate companies and running two separate code paths), you're probably good.

"The Standard-compliant" method is any algorithm that goes from hmac(passphrase) into seed -> generating the random numbers needed to build a wallet. (Prime numbers or whatever). As far as I can tell, this "standard method" doesn't exist, not yet anyway.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Issue has been the workflow for that, everyone wants something that works with thier phone and self-updates. Also have only seen a couple good air-gapped signers. No one likes the offline signer story except finance governance ppl so far.