CryptoURANUS Economics: HashCash: Cryptocurrency

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Sunday, July 21, 2019

HashCash: Cryptocurrency

HashCash

The term HashCash: Defined in Cryptocurrency in this page explains hashcash and how bitcoin uses it.
 
Hashcash POW


Bitcoin uses the hashcash Proof_of_work functions as a mining core.

All bitcoin miners whether CPU, GPU, FPGA or ASICs are creating hashcash proofs-of-work which is the blockchain evolution and validate the blockchain transaction log.

Algorithms hashcash uses hash function s as a building block, in the same way that HMAC, or RSA signatures are defined on a pluggable hash-function.

This is commonly denoted by naming an algorithm-hash: HMAC-SHA1, HMAC-MD5, HMAC-SHA256, RSA-SHA1, etc, hashcash can be instantiated with different functions, hashcash-SHA1, hashcash-SHA256^2 (bitcoin), hashcash-Scrypt(iter=1). 

History


Hashcash / proof-of-work function invented in 1997 by Adam Back, and proposed for anti-DoS attack uses preventing the anonymous remailer and mail2news gateway abuse.

The name "nym" on nymservers is a pseudonymous for remailer severs and as a general email anti-spam, and general network abuse throttling.

Before bitcoin hashcash was used by SpamAssasin, and the incompatible format by Microsoft named "email postmark" in hotmail, exchange, outlook etc and by i2p anonymity network, mixmaster anonymous remailer components and other systems.

Hashcash was also used by Hal Finney's bitcoin precursor RPOW as a way to mine coins.

Wei Dai's B-money Proposal, and Nick Szabo's similar Bit Gold proposal bitcoin precursors, also were proposed in the context of hashcash mining.

Hash functions



In 1997 algorithm hashcash that used SHA1, because at that time, this is/was their defacto and the NIST recommended hash, and the previous defacto hash MD5 had recently started to show signs of weakness, and as all do over time.

Bitcoin being specified/released in 2008/2009 uses SHA256 and improving.

There is  no strong reason SHA1 will not have worked, and hashcash relies only on the hash partial preimage resistance property which is a security up to hash-size, 160-bit with SHA1, and security up to 80-bit), so the SHA1 hash is big enough, but...

Bitcoin is built to 128-bit security related to 256-bit ECDSA being used, which also offers 128-bit security.

The SHA256 is more conservative choice and SHA1 has started to show some weaknesses.

Cryptanalytic Risk



An issue switching to hashcash-SHA3 is it will invalidate all existing ASIC mining hardware, and is a security risk.

There is no indication that SHA1 or SHA256, or SHA256^2 are vulnerable to pre-image hacker attack.

The motivation is missing absent new cryptanalytic developments.

If SHA256^2 became easier due to cryptanalytic attack, as miners start to using whatever the new algorithmic was, regardless, as difficulty would just adapt to it.

One side-effect will be to introduce more memory or computation trade-offs  could make ASICs unprofitable and currently is.

Computation advantages willo replace the hash with SHA3. Withoutl speculation as pre-image affecting cryptanalytic attacks are found on SHA256 is catalyst for change.


Hashcash function



Hashcash algorithms relatively simple to understand. 

These idea builds on security property of cryptographic hashes, designed to make difficult to invert, regards, any pre-image resistant property attack. 

Version 0 of hashcash protocol (1997) used a partial 2nd pre-image, however the later version 1 (2002) uses partial pre-images of a fairly chosen string, rather than digits of pi or something arbitrary, 0^k (ie all 0 string) is used for convenience, so the work is to find x such that H(x)=0.


Adding purpose


The service string could be a web server domain name, a recipients email address, or in bitcoin a block of the bitcoin blockchain ledger.

One additional problem is that if multiple people are mining, using the same service string, they must not start with the same x or they may end up with the same proof, and anyone looking at it will not honor a duplicated copy of the same work as it could have been copied without work, the first to present it will be rewarded, and others will find their work rejected.

This is what hashcash version 1 and bitcoin does. In fact in bitcoin the service string is the coinbase and the coinbase includes the recipients reward address, as well as the transactions to validate in the block.

Bitcoin actually does not include a random start point x, reusing the reward address as the randomization factor to avoid collisions for this random start point purpose, which saves 16-bytes of space in the coinbase. For privacy bitcoin expect the miner to use a different reward address on each successful block. 

More Precise Work

Hashcash as originally proposed has work 2^k where k is an integer, this means difficulty can only be scaled in powers of 2, this is slightly simpler as you can see and fully measure the difficulty just by counting 0s in hex/binary and was adequate for prior uses. (A lot of hashcash design choices are motivated by simplicity).



Work, difficulty & cryptographic security


Bitcoin also defines a new notion of (relative) difficulty which is the work required so that at current network hashrate a block is expected to be found every 10 minutes.
It is easier to deal with high difficulties in log2 scale (a petahash/second is a 16 decimal digit number of hashes per second), and makes them comparable to other cryptographic security statements.

The EFF "deepcrack" DES cracker project built a hardware brute force machine capable of breaking a DES key in 56 hours to make a political point that 56-bit DES was too weak in 1998 at a cost of $250,000 design time.

By comparison bitcoin network does 62-bits (including +1 for double hash) every 10-minutes.

This is 537,000 times more powerful than deepcrack, or could if it were focused on DES rather than SHA256 crack a DES key in 9 seconds to deepcracks 56 hours.



Miner privacy


In principle a miner should therefore for privacy use a different reward-address for each block.

Why Satoshi's early mined bitcoins were potentially linked, was because while he changed the reward-addresss, he forgot to reset the counter after each successful mine, (penetrations advisory), which is a bitcoin mining privacy bug, and a great loop-hole already fixed.

In fact with bitcoin the counter also should be obscured revealing your effort level, and with increased mining power that will imply who the coin belongs to.

Bitcoin does this via the nonce and extra-nonce. Nonce starts at 0, but extra nonce is random.

Together these form a randomized counter hiding the amount of effort that went into the proof, as no one can tell if it is a powerful and unlucky miner who worked hard, or a weak miner who was very lucky or hacked.

The introduction of mining pools, and the miner uses the same reward address for all users, which is what the current mining protocols does which is a risk that users may redo work.

Avoiding miners redoing work, the miners hand out defined work for the users to do.

However this creates an unnecessary communication round trip and in early protocol versions and which means the miners are not validating their own blocks, and this delegates validation authority, though not work, to the pool operator, reducing the security of the bitcoin network.

Recent mining protocol version allows miners to add their own block definition. This unnecessarily incur round trips for handing out work allocation.



Scrypt proof-of-work



A misunderstanding about the Scrypt proof-of-work is a scrypt not intended as a proof-of-work function.

Scrypt proof-of-work scrypt is a stretched key-derivation function.

Scrypt proof-of-work can not be used to make an efficiently publicly auditable proof-of-work, as verifying costs the same as creating.

Hashcash with the internal hash function of "Scrypt" may be denoted hashcash-Scrypt(1). Scrypt, by Colin Percival, is a key-derivation function for converting user chosen passphrases into keys.

It is salted (to prevent pre-computation/rainbow table attacks), and the hash is iterated many times to slow down passphrase grinding.

Scrypt is similar in purpose to the defacto standard passphrase key-derivation function PBKDF2 and which uses HMAC-SHA1 internally.

The differentiator is why people choose Scrypt rather than PBDF2 is that Scrypt's inner hash uses more memory so the GPU.

This does not use the key-stretching feature of Scrypt so mining is not actually using Scrypt directly.

The inner Scrypt hash (accessed by setting the iteration parameter to one iteration).

Scrypt's key-stretching function is not being used at all to contribute to the hardness, unlike its normal use for key protection eg in deriving the encryption key from user passphrase to encrypt bitcoin wallets.

Scrypt's key-stretching can not be used for mining this simultaneously makes more expensive to verify by the same factor.

Hashcash variant will be denoted hashcash-Scrypt(iter=1,mem=128KB) or shortened to hashcash-Scrypt(1).

Other major scrypt parameter denotes amount of memory to 128kB. Decentralization: hash-cash-Scrypt vs hashcash-SHA256

This 128kB Scrypt memory footprint is less vulnerable to centralization of mining power arising from limited access to or ownership of ASIC equipment by users resolves a profit based industry working against miners.

The hashcash-SHA256^2 is very simple. This simplicity ensures that many people will do it and ASICs should become less available that only serves mining farms and nto the common people.



In hardware the time-memory tradeoff would be optimized to find the optimal amount of memory to use, and it is quite possible the optimal amount would be less than 128kB.


This makes validating scrypt blockchains more CPU and memory intensive for all full nodes.

May The Crypto-Forces Be With You Always, and Be Careful/Safe!

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