Author: Adam Back 2013-10-28 12:14:33
Published on: 2013-10-28T12:14:33+00:00
In an email exchange on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Adam Back expressed concern over the use of X.509 in Bitcoin's payment protocol due to its susceptibility to corruption attacks and potential for security nightmares. Instead, Back suggests using bitcoin keys to sign payment messages, which can be associated with X.509 if desired. He also proposes a "pollution" of Bitcoin main with X.509 to avoid binding to Tor. Gregory Maxwell responds that the x.509 in the payment protocol is used for authentication and non-repudiation, not confidentiality, and that the payment protocol is extensible to support namecoin-provided keys and GPG authenticated messages. However, he notes that these would require a fair amount of code and may not be worth doing at this time. Maxwell thinks that Tor onion support would only require a few lines of code and could easily be more widely used than namecoin.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T18:46:03.369866+00:00