This week’s newsletter links to the announcement of the C-Lightning 0.7 upgrade, notes a service outage for the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list, and describes a proposed soft fork to eliminate several old problems in the Bitcoin consensus protocol. Also included are summaries of notable commits in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

Action items

● Upgrade to C-Lightning 0.7: the most notable feature of the new major release is a plugin system that allows your code to provide custom RPCs or run on internal lightningd events. The release also implements protocol enhancements and several bug fixes. See the release announcement for details and consider upgrading.

News

● Bitcoin-Dev mailing list outage: emails sent to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list are not being relayed to readers. List administrators are attempting to resolve the issue and are also investigating alternative list providers. Other Bitcoin-related lists hosted by the Linux Foundation (such as the Lightning-Dev list) don’t appear to be suffering the same problem. Future Optech newsletters will mention any actions list subscribers need to take in order to continue to receive protocol discussion.

● Cleanup soft fork proposal: Matt Corallo opened a Bitcoin Core pull request and attempted to send a proposed BIP to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list for a potential soft fork to eliminate several edge cases that could allow someone to attack the Bitcoin network or its users. The vulnerabilities have been publicly known for years and it’s believed that any actual attacks would’ve either been too expensive to be profitable or could’ve been dealt with quickly enough to prevent threatening Bitcoin’s viability. Still, it would be best to fix the vulnerabilities proactively rather than reactively. Optech summarizes the proposal in the following bullet points, but we recognize that many readers will be unfamiliar with the details of concepts such as OP_CODESEPARATOR , FindAndDelete() , time warp attacks, and merkle tree vulnerabilities, so we’ve also included an appendix to this newsletter that provides additional background on these subjects. ● Prevent use of OP_CODESEPARATOR and FindAndDelete() in legacy transactions: nobody is known to be using these two features of Bitcoin in legacy (non-segwit) Bitcoin transactions, but an attacker can abuse them to significantly increase the amount of computational work necessary to verify a non-standard transaction, creating blocks that could take half an hour or longer to verify. Most readers will probably never have heard about either of these features because neither one of them enables any known useful behavior that can’t be accomplished in some other way, but anyone who does still need OP_CODESEPARATOR can use the BIP143 segwit version of it, which was implemented in a way that avoids the computational blowup. Transactions making use of these features have not been mined or relayed by default since Bitcoin Core 0.16.1, released in June 2018. ● Fix the time warp attack: this attack allows miners controlling a majority of hashrate to maintain or decrease mining difficulty even when total network hashrate is steady or increasing, allowing them to produce blocks faster than targeted by the protocol. The increase in block production would accelerate release of Bitcoin’s block subsidy, potentially releasing all remaining bitcoins within three weeks of the attack starting. However, the setup for the attack would be publicly visible for at least a week before it had any effect, so fixing it has not had a high priority in the absence of a cartel of miners attempting it. The proposed soft fork fixes the problem by requiring the first block in a new difficulty period have a timestamp no earlier than 600 seconds before the last block in the previous period. See also Newsletter #10 where we mention a mailing list discussion about the topic. ● Forbid use of non-push opcodes in scriptSig: since the July 2010 fix for a critical security vulnerability, each sciptSig is evaluated down to only data elements before it is combined with a coin’s scriptPubKey for script verification. This eliminated almost any reason to ever use a non-data-pushing opcode in scriptSig (the exception being that it could be slightly more efficient for putting duplicate or permutated data elements on the stack). However, because Bitcoin still technically allows non-push opcodes in scriptSig, this could be abused by an attacker to increase the amount of work it takes to verify a transaction included in a block. Forbidding use of non-push opcodes in scriptSig has been the default relay and mining policy since 2011 and was forbidden by design for payments sent to BIP16 P2SH and BIP141 segwit. ● Limit legacy and BIP143 sighashes to the currently defined set: you prove that a transaction is an authorized spend of your bitcoins by generating a digital signature that commits to a hash of the spending transaction. However, to enable extra flexibility, Bitcoin allows you to use a one-byte signature hash type to indicate exactly what parts of the transaction (and related data) get included in the hash. Only 6 of the possible 256 values for the byte have a defined meaning so far—if you use any other value, your signature commits to almost exactly the same data as used for SIGHASH_ALL . The one difference is that the signature hash must commit to its own sighash flag, which will be different for the otherwise-equivalent data and which complicates caching. Since the adoption of BIP141 segwit, any new sighash types are expected to be introduced using new witness versions, so removing the ability to specify undefined sighash types allows improved caching for reduced node overhead. ● Forbid transactions 64 bytes or smaller: derived elements (nodes) in Bitcoin’s merkle trees are formed by combining two 32-byte hash digests into a single 64-byte binary blob and then hashing it. However, the transaction identifier (txid) for a 64-byte transaction is also produced by hashing a 64-byte binary blob in exactly the same way. This can allow a transaction to masquerade as a pair of hashes, or a pair of hashes to masquerade as a transaction, creating vulnerabilities for Bitcoin merkle proofs and SPV proofs. As there is no known way to spend bitcoins securely with a transaction 64 bytes or smaller, the proposed soft fork would forbid such transactions from being included in blocks. The proposal plans to use the BIP9 activation mechanism, with signaling starting on 1 August 2019 and ending a year later if the proposal isn’t activated. As this is still a proposal, it will need to be evaluated by protocol experts, implemented in a full node (see Corallo’s PR), and willingly adopted by users in order to be enforced.



Notable code and documentation changes

Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, LND, C-Lightning, Eclair, libsecp256k1, and Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs).

● Bitcoin Core #15471 removes the warning displayed in the GUI and via RPC about “Unknown block versions being mined”. This warning was meant to inform users that miners and users might be coordinating a soft fork activation using BIP9 versionbits, allowing the user seeing the warning to upgrade their node to understand and enforce the new consensus rules when it activated. However, miners have increasingly been using overt ASICBoost that involves using some of the version bits as a nonce, as proposed in BIP320, causing this message to be triggered spuriously. This merge simply removes the warning that was no longer helping users. Whether the project will adopt BIP320, implement a more sophisticated warning system, or attempt to use an entirely different solution for signaling of future soft forks (such as signaling via the generation (coinbase) transaction) has not been decided.

● C-Lightning #2382 renames the listpayments RPC to listsendpays . The command lists the status of all payments you’ve sent, but the previous name confused people who expected it to also list received payments. A new RPC listpays is also provided. At present, it provides basically the same information as listsendpays , but when multipath payments are implemented, it’ll collect all payment parts into a single JSON object. The same PR also allows the sendpay RPC to take a bolt11 field that will be saved and returned back to the user if they later run the listpay , listsendpays , or waitsendpay RPCs.

Appendix: consensus cleanup background

The following subsections attempt to provide some background on the current operation of the Bitcoin Protocol as related to the cleanup soft fork.

The time warp attack

The consensus rules implemented in Bitcoin 0.1 and all later versions require that a block must have a timestamp greater than the median of the previous 11 blocks. So if the previous blocks had timestamps of {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11}, the next block must contain a time stamp of 7 or greater (but 12 would be a natural fit).

However, what if miners created timestamps of {1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2}? Then the next block could contain a time stamp of 2 or greater. But what if you put in a time stamp of 12 anyway? Then the next sequence of blocks with minimally-increasing timestamps would look like: {12, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5}. From the perspective of someone looking at this sequence, it would look like you time warped into the past. You could repeat this trick for as long as you wanted to occasionally insert a block with a high timestamp into a sequence of blocks that otherwise minimized timestamp increments.

This is notable because the Bitcoin 0.1 consensus rules we continue to use also adjust difficulty by looking at the timestamps in just the first and last blocks in a 2,016-block retarget period—not any of the intervening blocks. So if miners use the above technique to prepare a sequence of low-timestamp blocks, they can give the first block in the period a low timestamp (say 8 weeks ago) and the last block in the period a current timestamp so that the consensus algorithm thinks those two blocks were mined 8 weeks apart—causing the algorithm to reduce difficulty to 1/4 the current value (the maximum reduction allowed in a single difficulty adjustment).

By repeating this trick over and over, miners could eventually reduce difficulty to its absolute minimum value—although it’s easy to believe Bitcoin would become useless before they finished as thousands of blocks were produced per second and the remainder of its 21 million BTC subsidy was drained. Part of what prevents this attack now is that miners would need to publish blocks with minimally-increasing timestamps for a large part of a regular-length two-week retarget period before they could start creating shorter-duration retarget periods. This would hopefully give Bitcoin developers time to create a simple patch (like the one proposed) and users time to implement it through emergency upgrades of their nodes.

The proposed soft fork works by requiring the first block in a new retarget period have a timestamp no earlier than 600 seconds before its previous block (the last block in the previous period). This means miners can only set an artificially-low timestamp for the first block in a retarget period if they also set an artificially-low timestamp for the last block in the previous period—but putting a low timestamp in the previous period would’ve raised difficulty then by as much as they’ll be able to lower it at the end of the current period, making any such attempt worse than useless.

However, if it actually did take a long time to mine all the blocks in a retarget period due to a natural loss of hashrate, the retarget formula will still work as expected for lowering difficulty.

Most miners using current software will probably follow this rule automatically, but upgrading will be recommended to ensure that they do. Lightweight clients may also wish to enforce the rule in case miners fail to enforce it themselves (as happened in 2015, causing a temporary fork of 6 blocks followed by several shorter forks).

More information:

Merkle tree attacks

Bitcoin uses a merkle tree to connect all the transactions in a block to a 32-byte hash, called the merkle root, that’s included in the block header. The merkle tree allows someone with a full block to prove to someone with just a transaction that the transaction was included in a block by producing a series of 32-byte hashes connecting the transaction to the merkle root.

However, the 32-byte hashes are used in pairs (64 bytes of data), and a carefully-constructed Bitcoin transaction can also be 64 bytes, making it possible to convince the user that a particular pair of hashes is a transaction or vice versa. In either case, the user can be tricked into accepting what looks like a transaction that’s part of the most Proof-of-Work (PoW) chain but which is not actually part of the chain and which has never been verified by a full node.

The proposed soft fork solves the problem by simply invaliding any transaction 64 bytes or smaller. This is reasonable because the required fields for a transaction consume a minimum of 60 bytes. In a 64-byte transaction, that leaves only 4 bytes free in the scriptPubKey field to secure the funds for the recipient. There is no known way to do that securely in so few bytes, so 64 byte or smaller transactions can’t have any security and there’s no reason anyone would use them other than for an attack. Such transactions have not been relayed or mined by Bitcoin Core defaults since 2010, so miners don’t need to change their transaction selection software as long as they haven’t changed the hardcoded defaults.

The rule only applies to the stripped size of the transaction, which is the transaction without any of the segwit parts. Because the minimum stripped size of a segwit transaction is the same as it is for legacy transactions, and because scriptPubKey is not a segwit discounted field, the above logic also shows that there’s no secure way to use segwit transactions smaller than 64 bytes. Bitcoin Core RPCs that return decoded data about a transaction, such as getrawtransaction , print the stripped size in the strippedsize field.

Miner generation (coinbase) transactions must include extra data beyond what’s required for normal transactions, so their minimum size has been 64 bytes since the 2012 activation of BIP34. The proposed cleanup soft fork requires them to be only one byte larger than this minimum size. Any generation transaction for blocks containing segwit inputs—which has been almost all blocks for over a year now— has a minimum size over 100 bytes, so any miner creating segwit blocks is guaranteed to pass this rule.

More information:

Legacy transaction verification

In 2015 a block was mined containing a transaction almost 1 MB in size, taking about 25 seconds to verify on a contemporary desktop. Besides its large size, the transaction was ordinary in every way, but it still took about 10 times longer to verify than an equivalent-size block full of smaller transactions. The reason is that verifying each signature-containing input in a legacy transaction requires generating a hash over part of the transaction’s data. The almost 1 MB transaction contained 5,570 inputs, requiring hashing slight variations on the same data 5,570 times.

Unfortunately, the Bitcoin Protocol also provides rarely-used features that can be exploited to require the same tweaking and re-hashing for each different signature-checking operation (sigop) executed within each input. As each input could require dozens or even hundreds of sigops, this significantly magnifies the effect of this attack.

Specifically, the OP_CODESEPARATOR opcode requires changes to how a signature commits to its executed script but does so inefficiently by committing to a separate copy of large parts of the entire transaction (e.g. almost 1.00 MB in the worst case each time a sigop is run). The BIP143 segwit reimplementation of this feature fixes the problem for segwit users by committing directly to the executed script, which can be no more than 10,000 bytes (0.01 MB).

Even more work can be required if signatures (or things that pretend to be signatures) are included directly in a scriptPubKey as this will cause an internal FindAndDelete() operation to modify the executed script and again cause sigops to commit to a separate copy of almost the entire transaction. Because a secure signature in Bitcoin commits to the scriptPubKey it spends, and because a signature in a scriptPubKey can’t commit to itself, there’s no legitimate reason to check a signature included in a scriptPubKey. BIP143 segwit addresses this problem for its spends by simply specifying that FindAndDelete() shall not be used.

Finally, the original Bitcoin Protocol also allows an attacker to add non-push opcodes to scriptSig to use up to an additional 20,000 sigops in a block as well as perform other operations (such as using OP_DUP (duplicate)) to increase the amount of verification work that needs to be done.

Combining all of these problems together makes it possible for a well-prepared attacker to create blocks that take a long time to verify even on fast hardware. Optech doesn’t know how long the worst case is, as researchers keep their example scripts private to avoid arming attackers. We’ve confidently heard that blocks can be created that take more than half an hour to verify on fast modern hardware. (Before the correction of other known problems with the above mechanisms, tests show that it was possible to create blocks that took several hours to verify.) An attacking miner could use these problems to denial-of-service attack verification nodes and other miners, possibly finding ways to profit from the situation. However, because the attacks involve rarely-used Bitcoin features, any actual attack would probably be met by a soft fork to immediately disable the features—ensuring Bitcoin would return to normal as soon as the fork activated.

We have no way to solve the problem of each legacy input requiring the hashing of a slightly different set of transaction data without forbidding the use of legacy transaction signatures altogether, but the consensus cleanup soft fork proposes to prevent the magnifications of the problem by forbidding use of OP_CODESEPARATOR in legacy inputs, the behavior that triggers FindAndDelete() , and the ability to use non-data pushing opcodes in scriptSig. Many developers believe this is acceptable because there are no known productive uses of the behavior, there’s no onchain activity visible of anyone using them, and because people who want to play with OP_CODESEPARATOR can still do so using the non-problematic version available in segwit. Together with improvements in caching, this could put worst-case block verification into the range of seconds rather than minutes.

More information:

● The Megatransaction by Rusty Russell - a block that took 25 seconds to verify

● CVE-2013-2292 description by Sergio Demian Lerner - a theoretical block that was hypothesized to take three minutes to verify

● Speculations on OP_CODESEPARATOR by Peter Todd - information about how OP_CODESEPARATOR was used before the soft fork to fix the 1 OP_RETURN bug and whether Nakamoto had thought to use it to enable signature delegation (the ability for the authorized signers of an output to give someone else permission to spend it without creating an onchain transaction)

● 1 OP_RETURN bug description - a fixed bug that allowed anyone to spend anyone else’s bitcoins. Called “by far the worst security problem Bitcoin ever had”. Satoshi Nakamoto’s fix for this bug involved separating the evaluation of scriptSig from each spend’s corresponding scriptPubKey, practically eliminating any use for OP_CODESEPARATOR and FindAndDelete()

Corrections