Author: Jimmy 2016-08-24 16:29:19
Published on: 2016-08-24T16:29:19+00:00
The Bitcoin Vigil program, published in 2014 by Coindesk, guards against intrusion and coin theft. Recently, on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, a similar idea was proposed for honeypots that incentivize intruders into revealing that they have broken into a server by allowing them to claim a reward based on secret information obtained during the intrusion. The proposed method uses a 2-of-2 multisig and the SIGHASH_SINGLE feature with a pre-signed standard transaction, which spends the honeypot txout to two addresses: a per-server canary address and a change address. The private key associated with the change address is also left on the server so the intruder can then spend that change output to finally collect their reward. A potential disadvantage of using non-standard SIGHASH flags is that the transactions involved are somewhat unusual and may be flagged by risk analysis at exchanges and the like, a threat to the fungibility of the reward. To improve on this concept, a "scorched earth" version of the honeypot pre-signed transaction would also be provided which spends the entirety of the honeypot output to fees, and additionally spends a second output to fees. If the owner tries to dishonestly doublespend, intruders can respond by publishing the "scorched earth" transaction, encouraging the honeypot owner's honesty and making CPFP-aware transaction replacement irrelevant. Note that Jeff Coleman deserves credit as co-inventor of all the above. Censorship resistance and doublespending are addressed by using the honeypot secret key shared among all N servers and the discriminant secret key kept secret, for each server a unique signature is created with SIGHASH_SINGLE, paying a token amount to a notification address. For each individual server, a pre-signed signature created with the discriminant secret key is then left on the associated server along with the honeypot secret key. If the honeypot's first transaction is signed with the opt-in RBF flags and CPFP-aware transaction replacement is not implemented by miners, the mechanics are particularly disadvantageous to the intruder as the honeypot owner only needs to increase the first transaction's fee slightly to have a high chance of recovering their funds.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:53:36.606925+00:00