coderrr

as long as mint.com has HSTS and either the user has been there once before or it was hard coded into the browser as an HSTS domain then the browser will never visit http://mint.com, it will immediately go to https://mint.com

EDIT: and well it doesn't seem that mint.com even has HSTS enabled... so bad example :P

From the proposal it doesn't sound like it's even a single log, but that each timeline server has its own log. I'm assuming when you publish your SK you send it to all of the timeline servers. So there will be 10-30 global append-only logs which are then mirrored by lots of SK mirroring servers. So not really like the bitcoin blockchain.

update: From the overview it definitely does sound like a single log, but the draft doesn't seem to specify how entries are submitted, replicated, or kept consistent between the timeline servers. This doc seems to hint at some of that: https://git.eff.org/?p=sovereign-keys.git;a=blob;f=issues/ti...

They do handle the key-being-comprised problem. When you register you can list third party keys you trust, which can be used to re-register in case of a key being comprised and revoked (by you).

But you're right they don't handle the key being lost problem (make sure you back it up!)

It's not really bitcoin-like other than the fact the store is append only. There aren't any DAGs in SK. There aren't really any DAGs in the bitcoin blockchain either (correction: bitcoin transactions - not blocks - do actually form a DAG). There is a tree with a single "correct" path that everyone eventually agrees on (the one which had the most work/computation go into it).

Yea if you send coins to a new address no one can prove you own that address. You have to be careful though. If you send 100% of your known linked addresses to a new address it's pretty obvious that you own the new address too and have just moved your coins to it.

It's a pretty complicated area to reason about. I expect there will be a lot more research on it in the coming years.

"Otherwise your identity would have to be 'disclosed' for each different address separately."

Actually, it's a lot worse than that. Most people will have a majority of their addresses linked without knowing it. http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/patching-the-bitcoin...

Sorry this is off topic, but did you ever analyze the results of your google spreadsheets survey here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763932 ?

Starts at 3:20. Apart from the somewhat bad audio this seems to be the best technical overview video of Bitcoin so far.

Slides at http://people.mozilla.com/~bwarner/bitcoin/

That's correct, we log connections TO our VPN but log absolutely nothing in terms of traffic sent THROUGH the VPN. So whatever you do while connected is not logged and therefore un-subpoena-able.

Only problem with the LD_PRELOAD method is that it doesn't work for all (many) apps. I believe one case it breaks for is non blocking connect()s, not sure if there are others. Although the iptables setup is a lot more complicated it pretty much works for everything.

We don't keep any logs.

One interesting benefit of using a local proxy tunnel (instead of VPN) is that you get rid of one round trip when making TCP connections. Since your browser will connect to localhost (~0ms) it will be able to send the HTTP request immediately rather than having to wait for a connection to be established to a remote host. Whether this actually ends up being faster or not depends on the distance between you and your proxy server and your proxy server and the remote host you're connecting to.

Just fyi, all your non-HTTP Flash traffic (Flash sockets) is probably not being proxied at all. Even if you have a SOCKS proxy set in the browser.

The easiest way around this is VPN, but you can also do crazier stuff like use ProxyCap (for windows or OSX) or iptables redirect/transocks setup in Linux: http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/how-to-force-flash-o...

Another shameless plug here... We provide a cheap (39.95$/year) unmetered VPN service at https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

We support all devices (OpenVPN, PPTP, IPSEC/L2TP) and have servers in US west/midwest/east, UK, and Switzerland.

"2) I think that some of our analysis would be possible to foil. Its probably possible for client software to avoid a lot of the account 'linking' that is due to transactions inputs being merged,"

I already did some work on this:

http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/patching-the-bitcoin...

I think the most interesting aspect of this whole thing is, like you mention, how new bitcoin-like currencies are perceived, valued, and participated in. Will everyone start jumping into new bitcoin-like currencies in hope of massive bitcoin-style investment gains? Will massive bitcoin miners attack new currencies networks with their computing power to protect their or others' investments in bitcoin? Will new bitcoin currencies be like social networks where only one dominates at a time for many years?

What would happen if a new gold-like element was discovered? "Red Gold" that had almost all the attributes of gold but it had a somewhat redish color and was actually a different element and it was proven to be of about the same scarcity worldwide. Would that halve the price of gold and would everyone jump onto red gold immediately or would it be shunned as not the real thing and be mostly worthless?

I'd be interested to know others' insights on this.

Yes it is but I don't think Bitcoin was created out of dislike of all banks, probably just the Fed.

I agree with your concerns although I think they are pretty analogous to people stealing gold out of banks. There's no recourse from that and if enough big gold reserves vanished I'm sure the gold market would be screwed up.

Of course those physical breakins are probly much much harder to pull off than hacking an electronic bank.

Completely agree. Although your code wouldn't help make a worm. Because even though you could get the Bitcoin client's peer addresses you couldn't remotely exploit them.

I'm worried about the bitcoin client being in c++ rather than java because that seems to make a remote code execution vulnerability a lot more likely. And given a single remote code exec vuln it'd be easy to make a worm which destroys the entire network.

I'm only getting this in Firefox and I'm also getting it on a bunch of other searches: download firefox, download winrar, download microsoft word, download anti virus, download free music

I'm pretty sure you can't set the Origin header yourself. That would kindof defeat the purpose of it. If anything they'd only allow you to specify whether or not to include the header. But I doubt any browser even lets you do that: $.ajax({url:'http:// asdf.com/1,beforeSend:function(xhr,set){xhr.setRequestHeader('Origin', 'http:// realorigin.com)}}) Refused to set unsafe header "Origin"

So since you can't force an Origin header to be on all of your legit API requests, you won't be able to differentiate them (using the Origin header) from an attacker with a <script> tag.

Ah sorry, I was only checking same domain XHRs, which doesn't seem to send the Origin header. That combined with the fact that Origin isn't sent for <script> tags seems like it can't be used to prevent CSRFs.

But how many browsers actually send the Origin header currently? I just checked Firefox and Chrome and neither sent it on a <script> or XHR request.

It seems to me the suggestion to require the 'X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest' header to be set is the best way to handle this, much better than some JS tweaking. It doesn't make any assumptions about javascript syntax or implementations. And the only way I can think to get around it is some http request splitting exploit via a proxy.

If you only return data to XHRs then you're protected by same origin policy and all <script> tags will get no data.

-EDIT-

When I first read "a better option is to require custom XMLHttpRequest headers" I thought this is what they were talking about. After a second look they probly mean setting a custom header yourself using the XHR object. This would work too but now I'm wondering if there's some way around my solution. Because why would they advocate a custom header if checking the X-Request-With header alone is enough?

- EDIT -

Was just in the shower and remembered why they probly don't advise to just check the X-Requested-With header. There are ways for an attacker to get around the XHR same origin policy with dns pinning/rebinding attacks. If you required a custom header with a session cookie which the attacker didn't have access to this would mitigate that kind of attack. EDIT: Nevermind, as long as you're checking the Host header a dns rebinding attack wouldn't matter.

interesting UI issue/inconsistency (in Chrome)... when pressing tab, it can either complete the current word/phrase or move to the X, so <enter> can either do nothing or clear the search box

cool, i'd be interested in hearing more on your setup, do you have your routing scripts up anywhere?

Yea I've never even tried this on windows, if I wanted to use windows with it I'd set it up on a linux box and route my windows machine through that in which case you wouldn't have the issue you described. EDIT: Ah I just realized what you meant about windows and packet reordering. It's actually not an issue with tunnel splitter because all packets will come in order. Tunnel splitter uses N standard TCP connections to tunnel through. The actual data will come to tunnel splitter out of order and it will deal with reconstructing the data, not the OS.

As for the 6 15Mbps connections those were just arbitrary numbers I picked. I'm currently stuck with sucky slower connections which is what I'm using it with. And DSL not cable. I'm not sure what you say about cable is true though since most cable modem speed cap is on the modem itself not at the ISP. At least that used to be the case. Also if you were using different ISPs that wouldn't be an issue, as long as they aren't sharing their network.

In terms of the pure linux routing solution, that is pretty interesting... Does it require that the remote machine has two physical interfaces or could you do the same with virtual interfaces like eth0:0 and eth0:1. Either way there are a few drawbacks with that solution. It will send 100% of your traffic through it rather than being able to selectively proxy. Also it only round robins so there is no intelligent load balancing as there is in tunnel splitter.

yea it does look similar, can't get their source downloads to work... have any links?

"Secret History of Silicon Valley" Google Tech Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ

I had to make changes to ruby's em-http-request for this

http://github.com/coderrr/em-http-request/commit/8e6444fe472...

anti anti frame busting here:

http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/anti-anti-frame-bust...