Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposal to address Bitcoin malware

["Martin Habovštiak" <martin.habovstiak@gmail.com>]

BIP70 is quite safe agains MitB. If user copies URL belonging to other
merchant, he would see the fact after entering it into his wallet
application. The only problem is, attacker can buy from the same
merchant with user's money. (sending him different URL) This can be
mitigated by merchant setting "memo" to the description of the basket
and some user info (e.g. address to which goods are sent).

But if whole computer is compromised, you're already screwed. Trezor
should help, but I'm not sure if it supports BIP70.

2015-02-01 14:49 GMT+02:00 Brian Erdelyi <brian.erdelyi@gmail.com>:
>
> In online banking, the banks generate account numbers.  An attacker cannot
> generate their own account number and the likelihood of an attacker having
> the same account number that I am trying to transfer funds to is low and
> this is why OCRA is effective with online banking.
>
> With Bitcoin, the Bitcoin address is comparable to the recipient’s bank
> account number.   I now see how an an attacker can brute force the bitcoin
> address with vanitygen.  Is there any way to generate an 8 digit number from
> the bitcoin address that can be used to verify transactions in such a way
> (possibly with hashing?) that brute forcing a bitcoin address would take
> longer than a reasonable period of time (say 60 seconds) so a system could
> time out if a transaction was not completed in that time?
>
> I’ve also looked into BIP70 (Payment Protocol) that claims protection
> against man-in-the-middle/man-in-the-browser (MitB) based attacks.  A common
> way to protect against this is with out-of-band transaction verification
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-browser#Out-of-band_transaction_verification).
> I see how BIP 70 verifies the payment request, however, is there any way to
> verify that the transaction signed by the wallet matches the request before
> it is sent to the blockchain (and how can this support out of band
> verification)?  Perhaps this is something that can only be supported when
> sending money with web based wallets.
>
> Brian Erdelyi
>
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