Re: [bitcoin-dev] Generalised Replay Protection for Future Hard Forks

[Jacob Eliosoff <jacob.eliosoff@gmail.com>]

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Thanks Mats, this proposal makes sense to me (especially the idea of
fork-specific addresses).  It prevents replay across forks, and makes it
easy for client software, and thus potentially users, to specify which fork
a tx is for.  But, like other (rougher) past proposals I've seen, it does
little to prevent users from accidentally sending on the wrong fork.

Take the specific and common case of non-upgraded wallet software.  Suppose
a HF happens, and becomes the network used by 90% of users.  Will old
wallets still default to the old nForkId (10% legacy chain)?  If so, I'd
expect a lot of accidental mis-sends on that chain.

This is just a gap in your proposal, not a flaw, but it's worth thinking
about less hazard-prone ways wallets could default nForkId.  Perhaps they
could listen to all forks, and default to the one whose last (recent) block
had the highest difficulty?  Or just check those blocks to see if multiple
forks are (nontrivially) active, and if so warn the user and force them to
confirm?  Something like that.


On Nov 6, 2017 7:05 AM, "Mats Jerratsch via bitcoin-dev" <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:


Presented is a generalised way of providing replay protection for future
hard forks. On top of replay protection, this schema also allows for
fork-distinct addresses and potentially a way to opt-out of replay
protection of any fork, where deemed necessary (can be beneficial for some
L2 applications).

## Rationale

Currently when a hard fork happens, there is ad-hoc replay protection built
within days with little review at best, or no replay protection at all.
Often this is either resource problem, where not enough time and developers
are available to sufficiently address replay protection, or the idea that
not breaking compatibility is favourable. Furthermore, this is potentially
a recurring problem with no generally accepted solution yet. Services that
want to deal in multiple forks are expected to closely follow all projects.
Since there is no standard, the solutions differ for each project,
requiring custom code for every fork. By integrating replay protection into
the protocol, we advocate the notion of non-hostile forks.

Users are protected against accidentally sending coins on the wrong chain
through the introduction of a fork-specific incompatible address space. The
coin/token type is encoded in the address itself, removing some of the
importance around the question _What is Bitcoin?_. By giving someone an
address, it is explicitly stated _I will only honour a payment of token X_,
enforcing the idea of validating the payment under the rules chosen by the
payee.

## Iterative Forks

In this schema, any hard fork is given an incremented id, `nForkId`.
`nForkId` starts at `1`, with `0` being reserved as a wildcard. When
project X decides to make an incompatible change to the protocol, it will
get assigned a new unique `nForkId` for this fork. A similar approach like
for BIP43 can be taken here. Potentially `nForkId` can be reused if a
project has not gained any amount of traction.

When preparing the transaction for signing or validation, `nForkId` is
appended to the final template as a 4B integer (similar to [1]). Amending
BIP143, this would result in

```
Double SHA256 of the serialization of:
    1. nVersion of the transaction (4-byte little endian)
    2. hashPrevouts (32-byte hash)
    3. hashSequence (32-byte hash)
    4. outpoint (32-byte hash + 4-byte little endian)
    5. scriptCode of the input (serialized as scripts inside CTxOuts)
    6. value of the output spent by this input (8-byte little endian)
    7. nSequence of the input (4-byte little endian)
    8. hashOutputs (32-byte hash)
    9. nLocktime of the transaction (4-byte little endian)
   10. sighash type of the signature (4-byte little endian)
   11. nForkId (4-byte little endian)
```


For `nForkId=0` this step is ommitted. This will immediately invalidate
signatures for any other branch of the blockchain than this specific fork.
To distinguish between `nForkId=0` and `nForkId` hardcoded into the
software, another bit has to be set in the 1B SigHashId present at the end
of signatures.

To make this approach more generic, payment addresses will contain the fork
id, depending on which tokens a payee expects payments in. This would
require a change on bech32 addresses, maybe to use a similar format used in
lightning-rfc [2]. A wallet will parse the address, it will extract
`nForkId`, and it displays which token the user is about to spend. When
signing the transaction, it will use `nForkId`, such that the transaction
is only valid for this specific token. This can be generalised in software
to the point where replay protection *and* a new address space can be
introduced for forks without breaking existing clients.

For light clients, this can be extended by enforcing the coinbase/block
header to contain the `nForkId` of the block. Then the client can
distinguish between different chains and tokens it received on each.
Alternatively, a new P2P message type for sending transactions could be
introduced, where prevOut and `nForkId` is transmitted, such that the lite
client can check for himself, which token he received.

Allowing signatures with `nForkId=1` can be achieved with a soft fork by
incrementing the script version of SegWit, making this a fully backwards
compatible change.

[1]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/
2017-February/013542.html

[2]
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/11-payment-
encoding.md

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