Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Feedback on P2SH web wallets
by
Undecidable
on 08/11/2013, 05:10:12 UTC
Maintaining Privacy
To maintain maximal privacy, it is important to not re-use bitcoin addresses. However, re-generating such keys repeatedly with each transaction would make many of the backup benefits that come with this system difficult. Users of bitcoin standard addresses already face this problem today and use a variety of deterministic wallet mechanisms to generate multiple keys from a single source.
The same techniques can be applied to the 2-of-3 address. Any key used as a signature should be rotated to a new address based on the next sequence in the deterministic key.

As a compromise solution, the 2-of-3 address offers one more option: only rotating the server's key. Since the 2-of-3 key is generated from 3 keys, one of which is managed by the service, we can rotate the user's funds to a new address by only rotating the server’s key. The resulting address cannot be correlated to the original 2-of-3 address. However, upon spending of the outputs, the public keys will again be revealed and a correlation could be made at that time. To maintain the ability for the user to extract funds without the service, the service will need to send the newly minted service public key to the user for safekeeping. This can be done via email. But again for maximal privacy, use of deterministic key rotation is recommended.

I'm totally with you on multisig for wallet security.  That said, I'm unconvinced these privacy measures are worth the inconvenience they incur vs the benefits of having a stable address.  It will be painfully obvious which TX output is change because it's overwhelming likely to be the only P2SH output ... there are other signals one could incorporate as well but this one alone would likely be sufficient 99% of the time.