[bitcoin-dev] Safer sighashes and more granular SIGHASH_NOINPUT

[Anthony Towns]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2018 at 02:54:42AM +0800, Johnson Lau wrote:
> The question I would like to ask is: is OP_CODESEPARATOR useful under taproot? Generally speaking, CODESEPARATOR is useful only with conditional opcodes (OP_IF etc), and conditional opcodes are mostly replaced by merklized scripts. I am not sure how much usability is left with CODESEPARATOR

If you don't have conditionals, then I think committing to the (masked)
script gives you everything you could do with codeseparator.

If you don't commit to the (masked) script, don't have conditionals,
and don't have codeseparator, then I don't think you can make a signature
distinguish which alternative script it's intending to sign; but you can
just give each alternative script in the MAST a slight variation of the
key and that seems good enough.

OTOH, I think for (roughly) the example you gave:

  DEPTH 3 EQUAL
  IF <Bob> CHECKSIGVERIFY HASH160 <H> EQUALVERIFY CODESEP
  ELSE <n> CLTV DROP
  ENDIF
  <Alice> CHECKSIG

then compared to the taproot equivalent:

  P = muSig(Alice,Bob)
  S1 = <Alice1> CHECKSIGVERIFY <Bob> CHECKSIGVERIFY HASH160 <H> EQUAL
  S2 = <Alice2> CHECKSIGVERIFY <n> CLTV

the IF+CODESEP approach is actually cheaper (lighter weight) if you're
mostly (>2/3rds of the time) taking the S1 branch. This is because the
"DEPTH 3 EQUAL IF/ELSE/ENDIF CODESEP <n> CLTV DROP" overhead is less
than the 32B overhead to choose a merkle branch).

(That said, I'm not sure what Alice's signature in the S1 branch actually
achieves in that script; and without that in S1, the taproot approach is
cheaper all the time. Scriptless scripts would be cheaper still)

> If no one needs CODESEPARATOR, we might just disable it, and makes the validation code a bit simpler

Since it only affects the behaviour of the checkdls (checksig) operators,
even if it was disabled, it could be re-enabled fairly easily in a new
script subversion if needed (ie, it could be re-added when upgrading
witness version 1 from script version 0 to 1).

Cheers,
aj