Bitcoin Transcripts

Libsecp256k1 Meeting

Date

20 September, 2023

Topics

bitcoin-core libsecp256k1

Speakers

Not available

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Topics: Scope, Priorities
Next release Dec 16th
Scope: Informal agreeement currently
What new modules to add?
Needs a specification (whatever that means, Pseudocode etc.0
Should we formalize the agreement more? Should also not be too specific
What are examples where this came up in the past? Exfill, Ecdh, Elswift, SIlent payments, musig, schnorr, adaptor sigs, half-agg
How specific do we need to be? Tie it to examples to be more clear
ECIES (Interesting in the future?)
Other problem: What is the boundary to core? For example move hashing to secp?
Need argument for security, needs use-case
Buy-in from maintainers, willingness to maintain it long term
Relevance to the project is very vague as a requirement
Security also hard to formalize
Example: Anti-Exfill, people want it, but not our priority, fulfilling the requirements would not have helped in that case, different opinions on this change
Requirements are hygiene but don't guarantee that it will be reviewed/merged
Attack hard to do and mulitsig solves it anyway
Would still be good to be transparent and give feedback earlier
What is a specification? External standardization documentation, hashing externally avoided the question for ECDH, ECDH is a protocol not a cryptographic function
Abstract description of a protocol, ellswift has the BIP
Documentation, just describe how intended to be used, can not prevent every possible misuse
Rationale/Motivation
Security goals
"Easiest way to use it should be a secure way"
Too large spectrum to clearly define, needs to be convincing to the group
Relevance: clear use-case, details still hard to agree on in certain cases, "good for bitcoin"?
Contributing.md going to be added by nickler
Next release for december features? ECMult_const, xonlyECDH, silent payments?
Silent payments now uses low level stuff it shouldn't be using
Would like to have a module for silent payment functions that do the work and encapsulate it
Make a PR on Secp? Show what it would look like, silent payment will work on it
All lower level component are already there for it
Change: remove scratch space, only wanted to do in a major release? Basically unused
Fix issues with secp-rust (nostd), they need to make patches to remove syscalls, which are not strictly needed
build system docs, contrib md
Musig
synthetic nonces in ecdsa? modern ecdsa module
1.0 was tied to milestones but abandoned to not hinder shipping incremental releases, still a goal to make a 1.0
Fuzzing project? Not far enough yet
ARM testing/CI (Macro Fake)
Priorities: ECMULT, ust nostd, xonlyECDH picked
Boundaries to Core: Where should hashing reside?
There are arguments on both sides: Con: Easier to get access to machine specific hashing optimization from Bitcoin Core because it is higher level, high cost to add this to secp, so either we have performance cost or maintenance cost, but for many things this may not matter. Pro: we could have higher level APIs in secp.
For bitcoin core hashing performance for ECDSA is very relevant, so probably not going to happen there, making it slower for validation would be bad
question if the optimization should be part of the scope?
what does applicable to bitcoin mean? could mean anything looking into eventual future, layer-2s etc. What about Muhash, checksums for tor v2 addrs etc.?
BIP32 module is probably in scope

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