[bitcoin-dev] Nonce blinding protocol for hardware wallets and airgapped signers

[Dustin Dettmer]

+1 love that progress is being made on this. Excited to implement it once
it’s ready.

Would love if things like the incrementing number were included in the
standard as well.

Cheers! 🍻

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 9:51 AM Marko via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Thanks for starting this initiative; it has been a long standing goal of
> mine to implement and release this protocol. Your blog post on the topic
> actually inspired me to pick up this work again a few months ago.
>
> Jonas Nick has implemented the protocol in the secp256k1 library for
> Schnorr sigs here: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/pull/590
>
> I have backported the same scheme to ECDSA in the secp256k1 library
> here, so it can be used also for current transactions:
>
> https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/pull/669
>
> I also made proof of concepts for the BitBox02 hw wallet firmware and
> BitBoxApp wallet to verify that the protocol also works well in practice.
>
> The actual scheme used in those implementations is a generalized
> sign-to-contract scheme, where the final nonce is computed as `k' = k +
> H(k*G, n)` instead of `k'=k+n`, but otherwise it works mostly the same
> for the anti nonce covert channel protocol. I suggest to use this scheme
> in PSBT as well.
>
> > We can either use proprietary fields [4] or define key-value pairs and
> add
> > them to the BIP-174. Depends if anyone else is interested in using this
> > protocol or not.
>
> I'd definitely be interested in seeing widespread support for this, and
> standardizing it would help with that.
>
> With PSBT used with an air-gapped signer, there is increased danger in
> implementing the protocol wrongly by relying on the contents of the PSBT
> alone in the final verification step of a signature. The PSBT must be
> verified carefully against state stored by the host for the PSBT.
> Otherwise the signer can for example change or pre-fill the relevant
> NONCE fields and leak the private keys anyway. Is there a current best
> practice for how a PSBT can be identified by the host to store/retrieve
> the state?
>
> Are there other examples in PSBT where the host can't trust the contents
> of the PSBT the signer returns (except of course for the parts the user
> can verify themselves, like recipients, amounts, etc.)? In any case,
> guidelines or conventions on how to avoid the pitfalls would be good.
>
> Best, Marko
>
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