On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Luke-Jr <l...@dashjr.org> wrote: > Is there any point to additional encryption over tor (which afaik is already > encrypted end-to-end)? Is there a safe way to make this work through tor entry > nodes/gateways?
The x.509 in the payment protocol itself is for authentication and non-repudiation, not confidentiality. It's used to sign the payment request so that later there is cryptographic evidence in the event of a dispute: "He didn't send me my alpaca socks!" "Thats not the address I told you to pay!" "He told me he'd send my 99 red-balloons, not just one!" "No way, that was the price for 1 red-balloon!" Just using SSL or .onion (or whatever else) gets you confidentiality and authentication. Neither of these things get you non-repudiation. > It'd be nice to have a way to support namecoin-provided keys too... The payment protocol is extensible, so I hope that someday someone will support namecoin authenticated messages (but note: this requires namecoin to support trust-free SPV resolvers, otherwise there is no way to extract a compact proof that can be stuck into a payment request) and GPG authenticated messages. But those things will require a fair amount of code (even fixing the namecoin protocol in the nmc case), and GPG could be done just by externally signing the actual payment request like you'd sign any file... and considering the sorry state of their _practical_ usability, I don't think they're worth doing at this time. By contrast, I _think_ the tor onion support would require only a relatively few lines of code since it could just be the existing x.509 mechanism with just a simple special validation rule for .onion, plus a little tool to repack the keys. I think it would easily be more widely used than namecoin (though probably both would not really be used, as gavin notes). w/ Gavin's comments I'll go check in with the tor folks and see if anyone has ever though of doing this before and if there is already a canonical structure for the x.509 certs used in this way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135991&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
