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MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

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Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#31
> "9. Bob's MobileCoin node sends Bob's client a message, which can then calculate the private key that corresponds to the generated one-time public key."

>" 10. Bob has now successfully received a payment."

If I'm reading this correctly, Bob's client (e.g. mobile app) must be in contact with the node for his address to receive the payment. This is pretty different from what I think will be Mobilecoin's closest competitors (at least from a UX standpoint), Venmo, Google Wallet, etc.

DDOSing Bob's mobile device or otherwise preventing access to the node would, at least temporarily, prevent the transaction from going through. Are the funds in purgatory during that period? If that client never gets in contact with the node, does the transaction ever get reversed, allowing the sender to regain control of the funds?

There are probably a host of other repercussions I haven't thought through yet. The idea of a cryptocoin as easy to use as Venmo/Signal is definitely intriguing.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#32
MobileCoin is backed by XLM/Stellar, which is not decentralized, and so I feel I should note here that I signed up during Stripe's giveaway of Stellar Lumens years ago - and I did indeed get my wallet credited.

https://stripe.com/blog/stellar

I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was:

"I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information.

You can see the merge operation here: https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ...

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point.

Apologies we cannot be of further help."

I have pretty damn good security of my various accounts using hardware 2FA and such, and I also transact in cryptocurrency and have wallets with far more fiat value in them than 6000 XLM had at the time ($120-150 USD if I recall), with absolutely no issue - and I hadn't even logged into their official wallet. The developers were 100% quick to blame this merge on me. I replied with a flat: "I highly doubt you are correct that it is my fault" email and it went back and forth with them asking the basic "well, did you get spearphished somehow" as if anyone even knew what XLM were or cared.

The process dragged on for a month while I bothered people in their Slack channel since email communication dropped out and they finally came back with:

"Our team has investigated and checked for multiple different types of issues and have not found anything on our end that shows any type of security compromise in our system.

Unfortunately this means at this moment I do not have a concrete answer to how your account was compromised. I’ll follow up again to check if there is anything on your end they would recommend you do."

I investigated on my own and found a number of accounts who were "hacked" and sent XLM coins to the wallet that I had merged with, all that just kind of sat there, indicating a software error on their end of a bunch of accounts that were randomly emptied. I provided all documentation to their team and spent a solid 15-20 hours doing so.

Their response to all of this bug bounty-type work?

"They have identified one potential issue in the past that affected only a small number of accounts, possibly yours. This bug was fixed once discovered back in 2014, but users who may have been vulnerable to the bug were still impacted during the upgrade process to the new network even after it was resolved.

Although we think this was the cause of what happened, we cannot be 100% sure if this was what impacted your account considering you had a strong password and none of your other accounts were compromised."

And:

"Although we cannot recover you original lumens from your account, we’d like to award you 3000 lumens as part of our Bug Bounty Program because you have helped us in identifying a possible issue that happened in the past."

So they basically gave me half the XLM back instead of the full amount despite it being entirely their fault and them having no idea how to investigate while I exposed a serious flaw in how XLM were assigned and paid to their wallets, all while blaming me the entire time and with atrociously slow customer response times.

Forgive me if I'm not the biggest XLM/Stellar Lumens fan; their team is both terrible at support and suggests that at least their frontline investigators are technically incompetent since they couldn't figure out the merge situation before I did with simple API poking around and enumerating.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#33

Wow. MM is really going all-in on for Software Guard Extensions (secure enclave) on the server. What does HN say? Do we trust Intel (motivation and implementation) that much?

It does rely on sgx being unhackable. Just hard to hack.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#34

Here is a year old paper from Imperial College and Cornell where they implemented trustless transactions using Intel SGX. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/teechan.pdf

This is significantly stronger and harder than what that paper suggested

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Nobody actually transacts in cryptocurrency," Goldbard says. "So making something that people can actually use is our first goal. And then we want to find additional ways that people can implement it over time. But initially all we want is to make it so people can actually complete transactions." This is being solved by Shapeshift.io and XMR.to. I transact in cryptocurrency all the time using these intermediary se…

https://xmr.to/ looks waaaay too complicated for the average person to use, which is a nonstarter for the average person. And it still processes a Bitcoin transaction, correct? So it will be no faster than Bitcoin?

>https://xmr.to/ looks waaaay too complicated for the average person to use, which is a nonstarter for the average person.

OK, that's fine, but services like that could - and will - get much friendlier. I'm just rebutting the quote which is the blanket "no one transacts in cryptocurrency" which is certainly not true for me, even though I felt that way just 2 months ago. Now that I am an active miner of various currencies, I find myself using it quite frequently for random goods/services, even though the plan was really just to convert it quickly into USD fiat to continue reinvesting into the mining operations or to pocket it.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#36
post #25

To repeat an earlier comment, this scheme encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers. You might say that by integrating SGX mechanisms into your security model, you create a set of 'feudal lords' [1] who can wield their power over you. A manufacturer may 'legitimately' establish an enclave in your most trusted hardware which you may not audit or even measure. And if tha…

Complete reference link: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#39

> "Nobody actually transacts in cryptocurrency," Goldbard says. "So making something that people can actually use is our first goal. And then we want to find additional ways that people can implement it over time. But initially all we want is to make it so people can actually complete transactions." Amen. Too few projects have this focus.

Because you can't get rich building it and you can't get rich hodling it and the press won't create much buzz.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#40
post #19
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"MobileCoin does not rely solely on SGX for maintaining transaction privacy. Transactions are designed to employ CryptoNote1 one-time addresses and onetime ring signatures, so MobileCoin will still maintain transaction privacy through unlinkable addresses if an attacker is able to defeat SGX and view transactions on the network." https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf Other than that, i very much share your con…

Interesting. So it has the same privacy protections as Monero, the only cryptocurrency with a track record of being untraceable so far? I wonder if the Stellar network is "leakier" than a decentralized network would be, though.

>>So it has the same privacy protections as Monero, the only cryptocurrency with a track record of being untraceable so far?

I wouldn't call Monero "untraceable" even though I am a very big fan of XMR. It takes work to put a lot of steps between you and the payee at more levels than simply the transactional one.

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