[Cryptography] Securing cryptocurrencies

[Bill Cox]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 6:36 AM, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:

> So, think outside the box.  Here are my suggestions:
>
> Room-heaters.  Build mining boxes that do 500w, 1kw, 2kw as room heaters
> and sell them for winter.  Those people who have to run electric heaters
> anyway will get a buzz out of an occasional lottery win.  Extra points if
> the heater plays a bingo chime.  Also, this does a nice distribution of
> hardware because your average family isn't going to be seriously mining
> these things for profit -- so we improve the distribution, the checking
> over the big miners.
>
> Digital signing / encryption accelerators.  Instead of SHA256 which is
> boringly useless and fast, build an RSA 4098 variant.  E.g., change the
> crypto algorithm to something that is now "dual purpose".  The point here
> is you run it for 6m as a PoW box and then sell it to a corporation that
> does lots of RSA.  Better than scrap :)
>
> (Quite what the algorithm of choice would be here, I don't know. Password
> crunching, of both forms... would require some thought, or 5 mins asking
> someone at Akamai.)
>
> I like the idea of building Makwa (a PHC entrant) key stretching boxes
full of ASICs that might also double as room heaters, clothes dryers,
electric stoves, and such.  Low powered cell-phones could securely delegate
the computationally intensive task of proper password hashing to these
boxes, and the box operator could keep any coins he might mine as a
result.  We could dramatically improve password hashing security this way.
I don't think it even requires a mod to Makwa.  Simply define the PoW as
finding _any_ y^(2^w) where N leading bits exactly match the SHA256 of the
block 100 back in the chain (since this cannot be easily changed), and then
publish a document containing this PoW, and the hash summary of the new
database transactions you are signing, all signed by the private key of the
wallet where the mining bounty will go.

Password hashing this way is naturally very ASIC attack resistant, because
it hashed with a box full of ASICs.  The only down-side is the boxes need
to be accessible online.  You couldn't use this for protecting disk
encryption passwords, for example.

Bill
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