[bitcoin-dev] Bech32 weakness and impact on bip-taproot addresses

[Greg Sanders]

Can you make it clear what the bold vs not-bold numbers mean?

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 4:56 PM Russell O'Connor via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 1:31 AM Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> That brings me to Matt's point: there is no need to do this right now. We
>> can simply amend BIP173 to only permit length 20 and length 32 (and only
>> length 20 for v0, if you like; but they're so far apart that permitting
>> both shouldn't hurt), for now. Introducing the "new" address format (the
>> one using an improved checksum algorithm) only needs to be there in time
>> for when a non-32-byte-witness-program would come in sight.
>>
>
> As a prerequisite to taproot activation, I was looking into amending
> BIP173 as stated above.  However after reviewing
> https://gist.github.com/sipa/a9845b37c1b298a7301c33a04090b2eb#detection-of-insertion-errors
> it seems that insertions of 5 characters or more is "safe" in the sense
> that there is low probability of creating a valid checksum by doing so
> randomly.
>
> This means we could safely allow witness programs of lengths *20*, 23,
> 26, 29, *32*, 36, and 40 (or 39).  These correspond to Bech32 addresses
> of length *42*, 47, 52, 57, *62*, 68, and 74 (or 73).  We could also
> support a set of shorter addresses, but given the lack of entropy in such
> short addresses, it is hard to believe that such witness programs could be
> used to secure anything.  I'm not sure what the motivation for allowing
> such short witness programs was, but I'm somewhat inclined to exclude them
> from the segwit address format.
>
> Given that we would only be able to support one of 39 or 40 byte witness
> programs, it is sensible to choose to allow 40 byte witness programs to be
> addressable.  This is the maximum witness program size allowed by BIP 141.
>
> So my proposal would be to amend BIP173 in such a way to restrict "bc" and
> "tb" segwit address formats to require witness programs be of size *20*,
> 23, 26, 29, *32*, 36, or 40.  Witness programs of other sizes (between 2
> and 40) would, of course, still be legal in accordance with BIP 141;
> however they would be unaddressable by using this "bc" and "tb" prefix.
> Another address format would be needed to support other witness sizes,
> should the need ever arise.
>
> --
> Russell O'Connor
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