Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Topic OP
The impact of bad crypto (DASH, SDC, etc). How much does math matter?
by
TechorMarketing
on 22/04/2016, 22:32:20 UTC
Examples:

DASH high school math:

Hey, I heard that you can break InstantX. When can we expect that to happen? I will personally tip you if you do it. Don't disappoint me. Generalize this said you could.

I found a high school level probability math error in the InstantX white paper that had been there for a guess roughly a year and nobody had done the peer review. So this tells you there is no world-class development team.

The white paper was claiming astronomical odds of colluding masternodes able to corrupt the InstantX transactions. I showed the probability was much more reasonable.

DASH paper wallet faulty RNG (January 4th - April 5th, 2016):

Hello Everyone,

Unfortunately we broke paper.dash.org on January 4th and the seeding process for generating a wallet was insecure since then. There are no known Dash thefts that have taken place because of this (yet), but if you created a wallet using paper.dash.org between January 4th and April 5th, please move your money to a new place.

We take these kinds of issues quite seriously and believe it's our fiduciary responsibility to create the most secure environment for users to store value safely in our ecosystem. To address the issue we’ve reverted the patch that caused the issue and have also reverted paper.dash.org to an earlier, much safer version.

Thanks,

Evan Duffield


https://dashtalk.org/threads/security-advisory-for-paper-dash-org.8525/#post-90291

SDC broken crypto:

https://shnoe.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/de-anonymizing-shadowcash-and-oz-coin/
https://github.com/ShenNoether/Deanon

Clearly there are not enough qualified cryptographers to go around.  Is high school math good enough if you have fancy graphics and marketing materials that can attract interest from uneducated users? Is it realistic to expect copy/paste altcoin devs to produce the type of cryptographic research generated by MRL?

https://lab.getmonero.org/
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf