106: Replays and mitigations 🔁

Jul 06-12 2020

tl;dr

• The third hard fork is expected this Sunday, upgrade your software

• Replay attacks, variations, and potential fixes discussed extensively

• Node was patched to fix a thread panic

• Evaluation of Bulletproof+ applicability for Grin

Grin 4

The network forks at #786,240 (Thu Jul 16), upgrade your software.

• Node: v4.0.1

• Wallet: v4.0.0

• Core team announcement of releases and more info.

Dev

• There are 87 open issues in /grin, and 34 open issues in /grin-wallet.

• Merged PRs: 1 in /grin | 0 in /grin-wallet | 1 unique contributor

• Hot off the presses a few hours before publication, a Grin v4.0.1 release resolving a thread panic.

• @antiochp weekly status update.

• The last dev meeting discussed status of v4.0.0, replay attacks, coinbase outputs, and continued high level v5.0.0 planning.

• The next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tue Jul 21 @ 15:00 UTC in grincoin#dev on Keybase. You can add topics to the agenda.

Research

• Bulletproofs+ comparison and its applicability to Grin by Suyash Bagad

• Extensive discussion this past week about various attacks related to replayability and uniqueness checks for kernels:

  • New posts in the existing forum thread about replay attacks;

  • “Play attacks”, and possible mitigations by @tromp;

  • Efficient solution to verify kernel uniqueness, by @kurt.

• Proposal for a light weight “Grin Stack” (node, wallet, explorer) by @phyro.

Governance

• A blog section was added to the grin.mw website for core team announcements.

• The next bi-weekly governance meeting is scheduled for Tue Jul 14 @ 15:00 UTC in grincoin#general on Keybase. You can add topics to the agenda.

RFCs

Draft

• Parallel IBD [node-dev]

Open

• QA Team [core]

• Deprecate HTTP(S) Transactions [wallet-dev]

Final Comment Period

-

Accepted

-

Closed

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“Fortunate Mimble” Artwork in this edition is by @LovelyGrin.

This newsletter is curated by Daniel Lehnberg. Any views expressed are personal and do not represent an official position of the Grin project.

Got news or articles you would like to include? Any feedback or other suggestions? drop me a line on daniel.lehnberg-at-protonmail.com or find me on Keybase.