On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 08:35:26PM +0200, Eric Voskuil wrote: > Hi Peter, > > What in this BIP makes a MITM attack easier (or easy) to detect, or increases > the probability of one being detected?
BIP151 gives users the tools to detect a MITM attack. It's kinda like PGP in that way: lots of PGP users don't properly check keys, so an attacker won't have a hard time MITM attacking those users. But some users do check keys, a labor intensive manual process, but not a process that requires any real cryptographic sophistication, let alone writing any code. It's very difficult for widescale attackers to distinguish the users who do check keys from the ones that don't, so if you MITM attack _any_ user you run the risk of running into one of the few that does check, and those users can alert everyone else. The key thing, is we need to get everyones communications encrypted first: if we don't the MITM attacker can intercept 99% of the communications with 0% risk of detection, because the non-sophisticated users are trivially distinguishable from the sophisticated users: just find the users with unencrypted communications! -- https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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