Transcripts

Silent Payments Libsecp Module

Date

8 April, 2024

Speakers

Not available

pencil icon

Transcript by

  • High level vs low level API:

    • Low level API could be more useful for multi-party SP implementation
    • High level API is safer as it avoid managing SP state and staging secret data
    • Rough consensus that high level API is preferable
  • Responsibility of grouping and sorting recipients by scan key. Client vs library?

    • We need to assert grouping in the lib anyway to avoid catastrophic failure
    • So it just makes sense for the lib to take care of the grouping
    • Why we need grouping in the first place?
      • This is for the case when a tx contains more than one output to the same SP address
      • The goal is to prevent 3rd parties from determining SP transaction and reverse engineering the recipient address from tx outputs using brute force
      • Need to have different shared secret, so salting shared secret with incremental k=0,1,2,33
  • Problem: How the client map result value from the lib back to the passed input? The order of outputs could be different from passed recipients because of sorting and grouping.

    • Current solution: single struct used for in- and out- parameters
    • Alternative1: include index of the input parameter in the output
    • Alternative2: pass through client defined ID associated with the input
    • Alternative3 (not ideal, but preferred): hide the index unraveling within the function
      • Limitation: we need to allocate arrays at compiler time, but we the size is only available at runtime. So it's not possible to copy the data into a new array, we have to do it in place.
      • Workaround: Can have an un-initialized filed in a struct
      • Recipient will need to copy the data before passing to the module because the module will sort the input and thus modify it.
      • Nice to have: we can sort back the input array to restore the original order, paying the price of another sort
  • Sending API:

    • Can use the concept of "examples" in libsecp to demonstrate how to use the SP module
    • Is sending performance constrained?
      • Could be for exchanges
      • Asking HW to do more ECDH is not great
    • Conclusion: just adding extra output parameter and "dummy" index (alternative 3 above) to the recipient addresses struct
  • Receiving API:

    • Can be used only when we have access to the whole tx
    • Currently we compute shared secret using a separate function
    • Proposed alternative:
      • Just pass the list of pub keys and the shared secrete is calculated internally
      • Instead of the list it could be a summed up pub keys. That would benefit light client nodes because they can get it from the index from a full node.
      • Also full node can use the summing function for the index, even if they don't scan for SP txs itself, but just serve the index.
  • Labels

    • Look up function callback
      • Useful for scanning performance for the use-cases with large amounts of labels
      • The callback should return associated label tweak if label is found
      • Do callbacks introduce performance issues with language bindings? Seems to work well in Bitcoin core
      • Possible to pass "null" in place of callback if the client don't want to implement labels
      • Void* parameter is there to have context passed in to the callback. This is best practice
    • preserving and returning label metadata to the caller to save cost of expensive lookup
      • Maybe need to add a Boolean for that purpose to be able to signal "label not found"
      • Also set pubkey to an invalid key
    • Light client
      • Use lower level function to be able to check utxo against the filter

Transcripts

Community-maintained archive to unlocking knowledge from technical bitcoin transcripts

Transcripts

Explore all Products

ChatBTC imageBitcoin searchBitcoin TLDRSaving SatoshiBitcoin Transcripts Review
Built with 🧡 by the Bitcoin Dev Project
View our public visitor count
We'd love to hear your feedback on this project?Give Feedback