Author: Lee Clagett 2016-05-25 00:22:50
Published on: 2016-05-25T00:22:50+00:00
In this email thread, Jonas Schnelli is responding to feedback from Lee about a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) regarding encryption and authentication of Bitcoin messages. Lee suggests that the MAC length should be inferred from the cipher and authentication mode, rather than fixed. He also raises concerns about unauthenticated buffering requirements, which would require an implementation to buffer up to 4GiB of data per connection before authenticating the length field. To address this, he suggests reducing the outer length field to 2 or 3 bytes, which would reduce the unauthenticated buffering requirements to 64 KiB and 16 MiB respectively. Jonas agrees with this suggestion and mentions that he has updated the BIP to reflect it, but leaves the maximum message length up to the implementation. Lee clarifies that his suggestion does not limit the length of Bitcoin messages and explains that it is similar to tunneling Bitcoin messages over TLS or SSH, which have their own length fields that do not prevent larger Bitcoin messages from being tunneled.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T04:33:59.202173+00:00