As a rule, proof-of-work does not really deliver the security properties people 
envision.  We’ve no really canonical anti-sibel criteria in this case, but 
maybe some mixed approach works:

First, introduction points have a default mode in which they rate limit new 
connections and impose some artificial latency.  Second, an onion service can 
issue rerandomizable certificates, blind signature, or oblivious PRFs that 
provide faster and non-rate limited access through a specific introduction 
points.

Coconut would suffice for the rerandomizable certificates of course, but sounds 
like overkill.. and slow.

We should consider an oblivious PRF for this use case too:

It’s easy to make an oblivious PRF from the batched DLEQ proof implemented in 
https://github.com/w3f/schnorrkel/blob/master/src/vrf.rs  I suppose Tor might 
adapt this to not use Ristretto, or maybe choose an Ed25519 to Ristretto map, 
but regardless the whole scheme is not too much more complex than a Schnorr 
signature.

We require the oblivious PRF secret key be known by both the introduction point 
for verification and the onion service for issuing.  In this, we do not share 
the oblivious PRF key among different introduction points because introduction 
points cannot share a common double redemption database anyways.

I’m worried about different oblivious PRF keys being used to tag different 
users though.  There are complex mechanisms to prevent this using curves 
created with Cocks-Pinch, but..

We could simply employ blind signatures however, which avoids sharing any 
secrets, and thus permits binding the key uniquely to the hidden service.  As a 
rule, blind signatures require either slow cryptography like pairings or RSA, 
or else issuing takes several round trips and have weak soundness.  I think 
weak soundness sounds workable here, although I’m no longer sure about all the 
issues with such scheme.

Best,
Jeff

p.s.  We’re hiring in security https://web3.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=38 
and several research areas like cryptography 
https://web3.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=29


Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP

_______________________________________________
tor-dev mailing list
tor-dev@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

Reply via email to