Author: Tamas Blummer 2014-03-29 18:16:28
Published on: 2014-03-29T18:16:28+00:00
Tamas Blummer suggests that usability features can be added while still protecting the underlying secret. He believes that revealing the degree of the polynomial used in Bitcoin's secret sharing process would not aid attackers. Similarly, a fingerprint of the secret that is unrelated to the hash used in the polynomial should not leak useful information. The length of such a fingerprint and the degree of the polynomial do not seem to be a significant overhead. Blummer reminds readers that Bitcoin's biggest obstacle is usability, not security. In response to Matt Whitlock's omission of the minimum subset size parameter from the shares because it would give adversaries vital information, Alan Reiner disagrees with this tradeoff. He believes that failing silently when given incorrect shares or an insufficient number of shares is intentional obfuscation. Reiner argues that users need to understand what they have, and failing silently only creates downsides.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T17:10:29.178067+00:00