[cryptography] attacks against bitcoin

[lodewijk andré de la porte]

The system is quite "self healing" in that once any attack is over, the
scraps will be quite efficiently picked up and woven into new fabric again.
No money can be "spawned" in the system, anything adverse that slipped into
the block chain will be sorted out after.

The expense of changing a transaction increases over time, if you want to be
sure of a transaction: wait it out. Up to a point that reverting the
transaction would hold no profit. That said it's relatively hard
to organize such an attack and it would most likely leave large traces.

Lewis

2011/6/12 Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>

> ----- Forwarded message from Ian G <iang at iang.org> -----
>
> From: Ian G <iang at iang.org>
> Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:12:08 +1000
> To: Crypto discussion list <cryptography at randombit.net>
> CC: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
> Subject: Re: [cryptography] attacks against bitcoin
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>
> On 12/06/11 8:16 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> >
> > How safe is the bitcoin cryptosystem and the communication network
> > against targeted attacks?
>
> It depends on what the intention or objective of the attack is.  And that
> depends on the threat actor.
>
> For example, a phishing threat actor would be looking to steal money.
> Whereas the state actor would be looking to figure out who is doing what,
> to attack out of band.  A competitor would look to attack the reputation,
> by e.g., disruption to reliability or mud flinging.  A retailer / consumer
> would look to dump liability.  Insiders would look to extract rents.
>
> Each of these interests from diverse parties result in different
> attractivenesses to different threat scenarios, many of them uncorrelated.
> Some of the scenarios and assets can be protected ("mitigated") by
> tech/crypto, but typically most cannot, and require non-tech mitigations.
>
> To go any distance on this, you'd rapidly end up doing a major risk
> analysis, a lot of work.
>
> The alternative is to start from the classical CIA, etc.  The problem with
> that is it that it is someone else's threat model, not yours.  You really
> don't want to discover who that someone is after you've built your system,
> it'll so ruin your appetite.
>
> iang
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> --
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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