[ad_1]
According to a revelation made Tuesday by the development team behind ZCash, the most highly capitalized cryptocurrency-driven confidentiality (with a market capitalization greater than $ 270 million at the time of publication), has secretly corrected a Critical security flaw in the design of ZCash, which was discovered by ZCash cryptographer, Ariel Gabizon, about a year ago.
Last March, as he was preparing a presentation for a conference on financial cryptography the next day, Gabizon discovered a crucial flaw in the cryptographic functions underlying zk-SNARKS, an implementation of the zero-knowledge evidence used by ZCash and other private rooms to give users the option of privacy if true cryptographic anonymity.
According to ZCash, the vulnerability (so subtle that the world's leading experts in cryptography have neglected for years) does not in any way threaten the anonymity of the network, but could have been manipulated by hackers to create an unlimited number of ZCash counterfeit.
If the security breach had been discovered by a less-scrupulous developer, it could have been exploited to potentially steal millions of dollars from users of ZCash before being discovered, which might irretrievably undermine market confidence in the protection of privacy.
Because other crypto currencies use the same algorithms, the stakes were high. These include Komodo whose KMD chips have a total market value of more than $ 70 million and Horizen (formerly known as ZenCash) with ZEN chips worth $ 22 million.
With so many millions of dollars of cryptocurrency money exposed to theft and sabotage, Zcash remained silent about vulnerable people and chose to secretly warn only Komodo and Horizon (the two largest market-cap coins that use faulty cryptography), and only after having quietly slipped a patch for vulnerability in the ZCash Sapling network upgrade at the end of October.
Market confidence in ZCash and Privacy coins
Emin Gün Sirer, professor of computer science in Cornell, tweeted:
All pieces of private life have suffered bugs "infiinites counterfeit". These types of bugs seem to be endemic to these currencies.https: //t.co/pFu45PFs39
– Emin Gün Sirer (@ el33th4xor) February 5, 2019
But it's a bit far-fetched to call these insects from endemic to private parts.
As the Bitcoin Core developer, Peter Todd (in a tweet-storm that reveals that he's hardly a supporter of ZCash, which he blames the developer for his incompetence and deception), this is not the case. is one of the two counterfeit exploits of Zcash:
(corrected) Zcash Counterfeit Vulnerability: https://t.co/MhB39pRCfo
"This vulnerability is so subtle that it has escaped years of badysis by cryptography experts focused on knowledge demonstration systems."
Reality bleeds Advanced cryptography is risky; second inflation bug that they had.
– Peter Todd (@peterktodd) February 5, 2019
It is also misleading to create such a nuance on the ZCash and Privacy parts, in particular, so that they are the only cryptos to have found and fixed security flaws that could have been exploited to create counterfeit crypto coins.
Last September, an update of Bitcoin Core included a fix for another type of design flaw that could have been exploited to give the same result to an unscrupulous actor, namely the ability to create an infinite amount of bitcoins without follow the rules of consensus. the expense that legitimate minors of Bitcoin must make.
But in all these cases, vulnerabilities have been discovered by network developers, and corrected by network developers, whether for Bitcoin or for blockchains using zk-SNARKS. These moments highlight the risks badociated with the use of the new peer-to-peer financial technology, but they also reflect the integrity, competence and tenacity of the developers behind the crypto-currencies and should inspire confidence in these teams.
That's why NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden praised ZCash on Tuesday for how he discovered the flaw and took cautious steps to fix it while preserving millions of dollars worth of encrypted pieces from users:
Many people wonder why I love #Zcash despite the reward of the founder. Here's a reason: This tax is funding a quality team that catches and kills serious bugs internally, before they are exploited. Some other projects learn about bugs like this just AFTER people have lost money. https://t.co/i9MD1CpeNx
– Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 5, 2019
Edward Snowden, famous for denouncing the NSA's privacy surveillance programs for Americans, has already praised ZCash for its privacy features:
To agree. Zcash's privacy technology makes it the most interesting Bitcoin alternative. Bitcoin is great, but "if it's not private, it's not safe." https://t.co/HqwQOvSCiz
– Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 28, 2017
Zero proof of knowledge and true anonymity
Inb4 "I'm interested in zkSnarks, the technology behind zcash"
– Andreas M. Antonopoulos (@aantonop) May 15, 2018
Although Bitcoin offers users a high degree of confidentiality and anonymity, all transactions made on the Bitcoin network are publicly available information on the vast public registry of accounts, amounts, and transactions handled by Bitcoin minors.
Instead of hiding the information, Bitcoin publishes all of them (although no individual or institution name is badociated with an account number or transaction).
The information is so dispersed that it is an almost insurmountable obstacle to monitoring financial activity, but with regard to the confidentiality of financial data, the cryptography markets have described a big difference between almost and completely.
Using Zero-KnowledgeProofs ZCash actually conceals users' financial information and activity by enabling them to prove verifiably to the rest of the network that they know a given value without disclosing anything of value itself. nor any other knowledge whatsoever.
The ZCash niche within the cryptosystem
Ahem, Bitcoin is not anonymous, not long term. It is weakly pseudonymous if you apply Perfect opsec, which can not be done.
– Andreas M. Antonopoulos (@aantonop) October 23, 2013
ZCash is suitable for use cases that require privacy, making it an ideal secondary channel in the encryption ecosystem, which can be used to effect truly private and anonymous money transfers.
The ZCash can then be converted back to Bitcoin to reduce exposure to the obvious risks of holding coins in smaller coins, with less market capitalization, less development, and fewer years devoted to research and repair of bugs.
[ad_2]
Source link
