Author: Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 2016-01-12 23:22:17
Published on: 2016-01-12T23:22:17+00:00
Zooko, a contributor to the Bitcoin development mailing list, suggests that the thread is omitting consideration of multi-target attacks. He believes that Tier Nolan's attack on the thread is the best example of this scenario and explains that if an attacker is happy to find a collision with any one out of a large number of potential victims, they get an advantage proportional to the number of potential victims. Therefore, it would be wise, in addition to the existing analysis, to estimate how many public keys will eventually be in use, ranging from 2^40 to 2^60, including added IoT goodness.To ensure that the attacker will never succeed, cryptographic security should be increased according to the number of public keys in use. Zooko recommends a recent blog post by DJB, a legendary cryptographer who works in this niche of cryptography as well as several other niches for more information about the "Attacker Economist" approach. The post has some interesting philosophical musings about this approach, which may be useful to readers.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:59:32.923182+00:00