Elliptic Curves: The Great Mystery • Hacker News Board

Re: Elliptic Curves: The Great Mystery

#21

Post by josh2600 » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 12:38 PM UTC

oleganza wrote: post #20

HelloNurse wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean you use known compromised/unreliable algorithms with a significant probability of allowing someone to steal someone's money?

The point of the OP was that Dalek library provides API to Ristretto ( https://ristretto.group ) which is a proper mathematical prime order group, unlike stock Ed25519 API that exposes cofactors and caused famous issues in Monero.

Yes this is my point.

This removes cofactor attacks which famously allowed multi-spend. Dalek removes or severely reduces this possibility.

Re: Elliptic Curves: The Great Mystery

#22

Post by acer4666 » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

josh2600 wrote: post #18

acer4666 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which curve do you use?

https://github.com/dalek-cryptography/curve25519-dalek 25519, ristretto group.

There's a weird sort of doublethink going on in your post. You're trying to attract talent that knows cryptography but seem to be using the same cryptobro snake oil you presumably use to sell your product (dude...imagine someone spending 8x the bitcoin!!!1! Even tho bitcoin uses secp256)

You also seem to be trying to give the impression you're doing something new and interesting rather than just deploying ristretto255 like everyone else. But you don't want to be caught rolling your own crypto, so you're being deliberately vague.

Re: Elliptic Curves: The Great Mystery

#23

Post by josh2600 » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

acer4666 wrote: post #22

josh2600 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/dalek-cryptography/curve25519-dalek 25519, ristretto group.

There's a weird sort of doublethink going on in your post. You're trying to attract talent that knows cryptography but seem to be using the same cryptobro snake oil you presumably use to sell your product (dude...imagine someone spending 8x the bitcoin!!!1! Even tho bitcoin uses secp256) You also seem to be trying to give the impression you're doing something new and interesting rather than just deploying ristretto25…

I think this is an unfair characterization. My point was to try to help individuals mentally model what could happen in the event of a cofactor attack. I think it would’ve been more confusing to say “imagine spending a txo 8x!” Because most people even in crypto don’t know what a transaction output is :/.

Please note that we didn’t roll or build Dalek, so again, this is a mischaracterization.

Also, yes, we are doing quite a bit that’s novel and interesting. For example, we implemented the first at-scale private information recovery system (entitled MobileCoin Fog) which makes extensive use of PATH and Circuit Oblivious RAM (and all of our stuff is open source). There’s quite a bit of new and creative stuff in our GitHub if you want to poke around.

Re: Elliptic Curves: The Great Mystery

#24

Post by mkidd » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 2:08 AM UTC

frutiger wrote: post #10

This book is a beautiful step by step exposition of the conjecture accessible to anyone with a high school/secondary school level education in math/maths: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691151199/el...

I second frutiger's recommendation of Elliptic Tales: Curves, Counting, and Number Theory. There should be more science and math books at this level but it's rare—either you're assumed to be starting from scratch or to be at least a graduate student in the field. I also recommend Jim Baggott's Perfect Symmetry: The Accidental Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene as another example at this rarely seen intermediate level. (Arguably all of Scientific American was at this level 50 years ago, but that era is long gone.)