Re: [bitcoin-dev] New serialization/encoding format for key material

[Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 9:51 AM, Jonas Schnelli via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> Hi
>
> The BIP proposal is now available here:
> https://gist.github.com/jonasschnelli/68a2a5a5a5b796dc9992f432e794d719
>
> Reference C code is available here:
> https://github.com/jonasschnelli/bech32_keys
>
> Feedback, criticism, etc. welcome!

First of all, thanks for working on this.

I have some concerns about the use of Bech32. It is designed for
detecting 3 errors up to length 1023 (but is then picked specifically
to support 4 errors up to length 89). However, for error correction
this translates to just being able to efficiently correct 1 error
(3/2, rounded down) up to length 1023. You can of course always try
all combinations of up to N changes to the input (for any N), testing
the checksum, and comparing the results against the UTXO set or other
wallet information that may have been recovered. However, the checksum
at best gives you a small constant speedup here, not a fundamentally
improved way for recovery.

However, we can design other base32 BCH codes easily with different
properties. As we mostly care about efficient algorithms for recovery
(and not just error detection properties), it seems more important to
have good design strength (as opposed to picking a code from a large
set which happens to have better properties, but without efficient
algorithm, like Bech32).

This is what I find for codes designed for length 93 (the first length
for which efficient codes exist with length long enough to support 256
bits of data):
* correct 1 error = 3 checksum characters
* correct 2 errors = 6 checksum characters
* correct 3 errors = 10 checksum characters
* correct 4 errors = 13 checksum characters
* correct 5 errors = 16 checksum characters
* ...
* correct 8 errors = 26 checksum characters (~ length * 1.5)
* correct 11 errors = 36 checksum characters (~ maximum length without
pushing checksum + data over 93 characters)

For codes designed for length 341 (the first length enough to support
512 bits of data):
* correct 1 error = 3 checksum characters
* correct 2 errors = 7 checksum characters
* correct 3 errors = 11 checksum characters
* correct 4 errors = 15 checksum characters
* correct 5 errors = 19 checksum characters
* ...
* correct 7 errors = 26 checksum characters (~ length * 1.25)
* correct 13 errors = 51 checksum characters (~ length * 1.5)
* correct 28 errors = 102 checksum characters (~ length * 2)

So it really boils down to a trade-off between length of the code, and
recovery properties.

These two sets of codes are distinct (a code designed for length 93
has zero error correction properties when going above 93), so either
we can pick a separate code for the two purposes, or be limited to the
second set.

If there is interest, I can construct a code + implementation for any
of these in a few days probably, once the requirements are clear.

Cheers,

-- 
Pieter