Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposal for P2P Wireless (Bluetooth LE) transfer of Payment URI

[Paul Puey <paul@airbitz.co>]

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Thanks for all the feedback Eric. You know we value all that you have to say. That's what this forum is for. We're looking for great ideas to harden this protocol and we're not closed to better ideas and we'll improve it as suggestions come up.



   
Paul Puey CEO / Co-Founder, Airbitz Inc
619.850.8624 | http://airbitz.co | San Diego
     



On Feb 5, 2015, at 5:05 PM, Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil.org> wrote:

> On 02/05/2015 04:49 PM, Paul Puey wrote:
> The trust can be considered bootstrapped by visual verification of the
> address prefix.

Another (unspendable) address can trivially match the prefix. Imagine
someone walking around in a mall with a phone in the pocket with a
malicious app, just disrupting business by causing money to be burned.
Manual verification doesn't fix this attack.

> If we are really concerned about someone jamming a Bluetooth signal
> in a coffeeshop then the UI can encourage verification of the prefix.

I don't think it would be great to constrain a standard implementation
to low cost purchases or the need for manual verification, but again
manual prefix verification isn't actually a solution.

> Much like how regular Bluetooth requires 'pairing' via entering a 4-6
> digit code.

An appeal to the security of BT bootstrapping isn't exactly flattering.

You know I love Airbitz, and I know you guys are extremely privacy
conscious. I personally would have no problem using this feature under
certain circumstances. My question is only whether it would be wise to
standardize on the proposal as-is.

e

> On Feb 5, 2015, at 3:46 PM, Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil.org
> <mailto:eric@voskuil.org>> wrote:
> 
> On 02/05/2015 03:36 PM, MⒶrtin HⒶboⓋštiak wrote:
>>> A BIP-70 signed payment request in the initial broadcast can resolve the
>>> integrity issues, but because of the public nature of the broadcast
>>> coupled with strong public identity, the privacy compromise is much
>>> worse. Now transactions are cryptographically tainted.
>>> 
>>> This is also the problem with BIP-70 over the web. TLS and other
>>> security precautions aside, an interloper on the communication, desktop,
>>> datacenter, etc., can capture payment requests and strongly correlate
>>> transactions to identities in an automated manner. The payment request
>>> must be kept private between the parties, and that's hard to do.
>> 
>> What about using encryption with forward secrecy? Merchant would
>> generate signed request containing public ECDH part, buyer would send
>> back transaction encrypted with ECDH and his public ECDH part. If
>> receiving address/amount is meant to be private, use commit protocol
>> (see ZRTP/RedPhone) and short authentication phrase (which is hard to
>> spoof thanks to commit protocol - see RedPhone)?
> 
> Hi Martin,
> 
> The problem is that you need to verify the ownership of the public key.
> A MITM can substitute the key. If you don't have verifiable identity
> associated with the public key (PKI/WoT), you need a shared secret (such
> as a secret phrase). But the problem is then establishing that secret
> over a public channel.
> 
> You can bootstrap a private session over the untrusted network using a
> trusted public key (PKI/WoT). But the presumption is that you are
> already doing this over the web (using TLS). That process is subject to
> attack at the CA. WoT is not subject to a CA attack, because it's
> decentralized. But it's also not sufficiently deployed for some scenarios.
> 
> e


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