[Cryptography] asymmetric attacks on crypto-protocols - the rough consensus attack

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Mon Aug 3 15:45:29 EDT 2015


> Jerry described the coin toss.  This "addresses" Stephen's dual-attack at some level.  What it does is actually give a 50% chance of the good protocol, and a 50% chance of the challenger.
You're changing the nature of the attack.  I took your attack to be "find two essentially equal protocols and keep the decision procedure stuck on deciding between them".  If one of the protocols is actually *better* along the agreed-upon dimensions - for example, if one has a security flaw - the whole assumption of the "rough consensus" approach is that this will be found eventually and the better protocol will win on the technical merits.

If you can't determine that one of the proposed protocols is actually unacceptable according to the agreed criteria, you have a very different problem, which has nothing to do with rough consensus, working code, committee procedures, or what have you.
                                                        -- Jerry




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