A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

Post by mbrock » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 9:17 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #126

mbrock wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means there is an entrepreneurial prospect for you to enter the space with a team that has a more serious background, right? Eventually people will generally understand that contracts require serious correct engineering, and you'll be able to capitalize on expertise. Smart contracts have only been generally available for like a couple of years. Most people are clueless about how to do them properly. That means i…

>Eventually people will generally understand that contracts require serious correct engineering, and you'll be able to capitalize on expertise. No one gets paid for exploiting a minor hole in a bridge, causing it to collapse. They will by finding holes in smart contracts, as evidenced. Bug bounty programs do not exist to provide alternative means of financial remuneration for black hat hackers. They exist to provide…

Post by j08ny » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 9:29 AM UTC

kierenj wrote: post #140

Animats wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are not sufficient conditions for a one-time pad. The entire pad, not just some "seed" has to be random. The pad cannot ever be reused even with a different plaintext. Breaking a one-time pad that's been used twice is not very hard. It's equivalent to recovering two texts which have been XORed together, which is not hard for English. One time pad systems are used regularly for high-security embassy-to-State Dep…

I don't understand how this is practical. If you have a highly secure mechanism for distributing the ultimate secret - one-time-pads - why not just distribute the messages in this way? Is it just the fact that it would take two trips for the courier? Or that someone would need to intercept both communications (pad, ciphertext)?

Post by davidgerard » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 9:36 AM UTC

lowpro wrote: post #6

icelancer wrote: post #2

>"It’s important to understand that this exploit was not a vulnerability in Ethereum or in Parity itself." I mean.... I guess. It's a feature of Ethereum, if we're going to weasel around.

I know I'm this situation the dev made a simple mistake, but I wonder if Ethereum is safe as a system assuming developers will make many mistakes, and those mistakes will happen more often as more complicated contracts are written. At some point I wonder if the idea of smart contracts is better than a traditional system, since they seem prone to developer error due to complexity.

Post by AsyncAwait » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 9:37 AM UTC

ckastner wrote: post #130

> Having sounded the alarm bells, a group of benevolent white-hat hackers from the Ethereum community rapidly organized. They analyzed the attack and realized that there was no way to reverse the thefts, yet many more wallets were vulnerable. Time was of the essence, so they saw only one available option: hack the remaining wallets before the attacker did. > By exploiting the same vulnerability, the white-hats hacked…

Post by bhaak » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 9:38 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #36

pmoriarty wrote: post #5

"smart contracts can also do things that normal contracts can’t, such as enforce a set of rules entirely through unbreakable cryptography." Isn't "unbreakable" a bit of a dirty word in the security community? Is there really such a thing as "unbreakable cryptography"?

"Is there really such a thing as "unbreakable cryptography"?" Yes. One time pads are unbreakable. "Even after the aliens from Andromeda land with their massive spaceships and undreamed-of computing power, they will not be able to read the Soviet spy messages encrypted with one-time pads (unless they can also go back in time and get the one-time pads)." (Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography)