Just to chime in on these points:

My discussions with ghost43 and ThomasV led me to the same conclusion, at least 
in general, for the whole watch-only issue:

It's necessary that the key tweak (`c` as per draft BIP) be known by Proposer 
(because has to add it to transaction before signing) and Receiver (to check 
ownership), but must not be known by anyone else (else Coinjoin function 
fails), hence it can't be publically derivable in any way but must require 
information secret to the two parties. This can be a pure random sent along 
with the encrypted proposal (the original concept), or based on such, or 
implicit via ECDH (arubi's suggestion, now in the draft, requiring each party 
to access their own secret key). So I reached the same conclusion: the classic 
watch-only use case of monitoring a wallet in real time with no privkey access 
is incompatible with this.

It's worth mentioning a nuance, however: distinguish two requirements: (1) to 
recover from zero information and (2) to monitor in real time as new SNICKER 
transactions arrive.

For (2) it's interesting to observe that the tweak `c` is not a 
money-controlling secret; it's only a privacy-controlling secret. If you 
imagined two wallets, one hot and one cold, with the second tracking the first 
but having a lower security requirement because cold, then the `c` values could 
be sent along from the hot to the cold, as they are created, without changing 
the cold's security model as they are not money-controlling private keys. They 
should still be encrypted of course, but that's largely a technical detail, if 
they were exposed it would only break the effect of the coinjoin outputs being 
indistinguishable.

For (1) the above does not apply; for there, we don't have anyone telling us 
what `c` values to look for, we have to somehow rederive, and to do that we 
need key access, so it reverts to the discussion above about whether it might 
be possible to interact with the cold wallet 'manually' so to speak.

To be clear, I don't think either of the above paragraphs describe things that 
are particularly likely to be implemented, but the hot/cold monitoring is at 
least feasible, if there were enough desire for it.

At the higher level, how important is this? I guess it just depends; there are 
similar problems (not identical, and perhaps more addressable?) in Lightning; 
importing keys is generally non-trivial; one can always sweep non-standard keys 
back into the HD tree, but clearly that is not really a solution in general; 
one can mark out wallets/seeds of this type as distinct; not all wallets need 
to have watch-only (phone wallets? small wallets? lower security?) one can 
prioritise spends of these coins. Etc.

Some more general comments:

Note Elichai's comment on the draft (repeated here for local convenience: 
https://gist.github.com/AdamISZ/2c13fb5819bd469ca318156e2cf25d79#gistcomment-3014924)
 about AES-GCM vs AES-CBC, any thoughts?

I didn't discuss the security of the construction for a Receiver from a 
Proposer who should after all be assumed to be an attacker (except, I 
emphasised that PSBT parsing could be sensitive on this point); I hope it's 
clear to everyone that the construction Q = P + cG is only controllable by the 
owner of the discrete log of P (trivial reduction: if an attacker who knows c, 
can find the private key q of Q, he can derive the private key p of P as q - c, 
thus he is an ECDLP cracker).

Thanks for all the comments so far, it's been very useful.

AdamISZ/waxwing/Adam Gibson

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Monday, October 21, 2019 4:04 PM, SomberNight via bitcoin-dev 
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> > The SNICKER recovery process is, of course, only required for wallet
>
> recovery and not normal wallet use, so I don't think a small amount of
> round-trip communication between the hot wallet and the cold wallet is
> too much to ask---especially since anyone using SNICKER with a
> watching-only wallet must be regularly interacting with their cold
> wallet anyway to sign the coinjoins.
>
> What you described only considers the "initial setup" of a watch-only wallet. 
> There are many usecases for watch-only wallets. There doesn't even 
> necessarily need to be any offline-signing involved. For example, consider a 
> user who has a hot wallet on their laptop with xprv; and wants to watch their 
> addresses using an xpub from their mobile. Or consider giving an xpub to an 
> accountant. Or giving an xpub to your Electrum Personal Server (which is how 
> it works).
>
> Note that all these usecases require "on-going" discovery of addresses, and 
> so they would break.
>
> ghost43
>
> (ps: Apologies Dave for the double-email; forgot to cc list originally)
>
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev


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