Matthew Roberts

I am a cryptobiologist specializing in the study of digital life forms like blockchains and certain kinds of unbounded smart contracts. “We must not let our politics harm these beautiful creatures.” – Myself.

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Expl0itch4ins

Update: 19/02/2017 - added discussion on hacker news.
I also added an example.
Update: 21/02/2017 - added discussion of obfuscated exploits, early disclosure penalties, incentives, and scalability

Bug bounties suck. Researchers routinely don’t get paid for their work and vendors continue to get away with the same shitty behavior. It’s a system that lacks any kind of accountability and only benefits the company.

Solution: Do it as a smart contract on a blockchain.

An example

  1. A smart contract to audit a C-based program is written. It includes a test case to see if a file with a specific name has been created under the process’ permissions. It also includes information about the program.
  2. A researcher finds a bug and uses it to write a buffer overflow exploit. The exploit is designed to pass the test case and is written using a special domain specific language for exploitable code for...

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Some simple smart contracts to dispel the hype

In the past I’ve said that “smart contracts” are protocols for exchanging crypto-payment for some kind of specialized product or service without the need for trust. But within the Bitcoin-space I still see many examples of things that shouldn’t really be called a smart contract at all.

So here are some examples of some smart contracts that clearly show how payment can be given for some kind of service that has then been intertwined with payments so closely that trust is removed.

I’ll start with the simplest contract I know of and move on to some new contracts that help demonstrate the idea behind universal verifiability in trustless trade protocols. Here is the first contract.

Example 1: Paying for a hash collision


value1 = get_input()
value2 = get_input()
btc_address = get_input()

 Values need to be different to prove a collision.
if value1 == value2:
    exit()

if sha256(value1)
...

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What if smart contracts were a new web standard = new achievement unlocked?

Edit: thought of a catchy name for this – Smart REST.

Smart contracts are all about formalizing trust relationships in an effort to try reduce critical points of failure within an agreement. The idea is that instead of trusting that a person will carry out a given function - we clearly segregate and define those responsibilities which can then be tied to the conditional release of collateral, the change of reputation, the conclusion of a legal contract, and even actions taking place within the real world.

To do this we use cryptographic ledgers which offer us a way to securely and publicly record relationships between individuals. In the case of financial relationships – some of these relationships can be made 100% trustless by using cryptography (a godsend to finance) - and in other cases its usually possible to reduce the amount of trust involved by using things like distributed...

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How a super computer could prevent future exchange hacks

Emin Gün Sirer published a paper this year [0] that described “Bitcoin vaults” [1] - a new mechanism for forcing coins to be locking up for a certain amount of time before they can be spent. The idea is for the owner to be able to recover coins during a designated clearing phase whose progress is made publicly visible on the blockchain. The owner could then recover coins from transactions [2] that he or she didn’t authorize even if their private keys were compromised. This idea is genuinely revolutionary [10] as currently owners have no way to reverse payments if they get hacked.

vault_diagram.png

If something like this had of existed before the recent Bitfinex hack we might have had a chance to prevent it. Unfortunately, schemes like this rely on having to change Bitcoin’s consensus rules which is a task that’s notoriously difficult to do. Only certain changes to the code can be safely made and it...

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Datachains: an AI driven DAS for incentivizing taste-based content delivery

Future decentralized autonomous systems (DAS) will likely be focused on distributing specialized AI agents for finding patterns in bulk data sets. These DAS will be funded with a pre-existing cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and then pegged to the entity in such a way that the assets can be given out as rewards for correct solutions without human intervention. The resulting system forms a decentralized, autonomous, peer-to-peer, client-to-client, datachain that rewards assets for finding data that the AI likes.

The use-cases for such a system would be in big data processing, web scraping, and data mining where remote files are scattered all over the Internet and are too resource intensive for any one organization to search for specific patterns. Such a system may help us to find new meaning in the vast stores of content already accessible via the Internet, for example - crowd sourced cat...

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Smart contracts vs dumb contracts

Update 7/12 I merged the discussion of datachains and pornchains into a separate article which is now here: http://roberts.pm/datachain.

When I first entered the Bitcoin space the term “smart contract” had a very specific meaning: it was any transactional protocol built on top of Bitcoin whose basic functionality did not have to depend on trusting a third-party. In other words, a smart contract had the same requirements for trust as Bitcoin did – that the results were absolute and it was beyond the power of anyone to circumvent the intended behaviors of the system.

Today, the term “smart contract” is used to refer to any kind of program or transactional protocol making use of the blockchain, period. The definition has become so very broad that it can more or less be applied to anything, but before I get side-tracked talking about that - I would like to revisit the early days and...

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The crypto conman

I’ve recently started a consulting business that specializes in blockchain technology and so far its been going quite well. There’s all the usual highs and lows of running a business: “this will never work”, “this is completely hopeless”, “we’re getting no customers”, “we got 1 million leads today” … to the more mundane stuff like the clients wants us to clone Google in 2 hours for a fraction of the cost of a cup of coffee. But today I noticed something more sinister show up: The Crypto Conman.

The Crypto Conman first contacted me about 2 days ago regarding a new blockchain project. The job was simple enough: he wanted us to modify an existing cryptocurrency to change a few parameters in the source code. Normally we hate jobs like this because there’s very little dev work involved so the job effectively amounts to some educated copy and pasting. But alas, such is the life of consulting...

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Building a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange using zero-knowledge proofs

7/12/2017: The protocol is flawed and contains a black mail risk. The other side cannot claim a refund without knowledge of the secret so even if the TXIDs can be validated with ZK-proofs the scheme still doesn’t work. I guess its back to the drawing board with this idea.

Edit 5/9/2016: I’ve updated the scheme. I’ll update it again if I get time to think of a way to avoid using timelock encryption for the refunds since that will make it more secure. Although I want to add that timelock encryption depends on the security assumptions of hash functions so its also not like this is particularly crazy (as new and scary as things may sound.)

Quite recently its become possible for those outside the field of cryptography to construct zero-knowledge proofs. One such proof is a proof for SHA256 hashes that basically allows anyone to state that “yes, I know some value that produces some known...

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Decentralized atomic cloud storage using Bitcoin

Update: 7/12/17: The biggest flaw with this proposal is that its not atomic with respect to a user’s bandwidth (and this is a crucial concern in a decentralized cloud storage systems.) My conclusion is that payment protocols for these systems cannot be made much more low trust than a standard micro-payment channel (unless there is some use-case where bandwidth can be ignored but I can’t think of one.)

Update: 13/01/17. A recent paper has emerged describing a “new technique” for doing “Atomic Verification Via Private Key Locked Bitcoin Transactions.” This paper is so similar to the scheme I described here 10 months ago that its hard to tell if this is plagiarism or a genuine mistake. It’s also interesting to note that the author’s scheme won’t work on the Bitcoin network since it depends on OP_AND which is currently disabled and their proposal won’t guarantee a file’s availability under

...

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Introducing the timechain

By Matthew Roberts and Elías Snær Einarsson

Update: April 20, 2017 - See “Turning back the clock on timechains -
a follow-up” for a discussion on security.

Historically companies and individuals have struggled to uphold adequate security practices when it comes to the handling and storing of cryptocurrencies and this can be seen in the numerous hacks that have plagued this industry.

Probably almost every large Bitcoin exchange and wallet provider have seen at least one major security incident which either lead to (or could have lead to) the loss of customer’s funds. The problem at hand is actually very simple and comes down to one basic issue: the need to keep ECDSA private keys around for signing withdrawals.

Example 1

Imagine you’re a currency exchange for cryptocurrencies. To be able to credit customer’s accounts you generate Bitcoin addresses on the fly and associate them with...

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