Iota cryptocurrency shuts down entire network after wallet hack
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Iota also relies on a central server[2]. So many others[3] have criticized it too.
[1] https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...
[2] https://domschiener.gitbooks.io/iota-guide/content/chapter1/...
[3] https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-al...
> the IOTA Foundation shut down "Coordinator,"
FIFY: centralized
What's bad about the tangle? Its like hundreds of interwoven blockchains. Pretty good idea. GIT too uses a directed acyclic graph.
Skimming through the info on the tangle, concentrating on its dagness seems superficial (is it even one? They talk about merging nodes a lot which sounds like cycles to me EDIT: ignore this aside). Anyways, things like this should have security proofs (or at least arguments) and maybe it does, i havent read enough in depth to know. But if it doesn't i would say the skepticism is very well warranted
GIT, as you may know, has branches. IOTA in a sense, does too, a lot of them.
And again, this incident was caused by a Nodejs/NPM package, not by the IOTA tangle or protocol.
Anyway; the network itself was not hacked, which is good I guess. And the coordinator (centralized node) is said to be the training wheels which will be removed at some point, but it still seems to be quite far of into the future.
After seeing the other side of the fence, I am quite surprised that anyone would make native apps with Node.JS. In the time you set up your dependencies for your Electron, ReactNative or whatever you can have your native macOS or iOS app UI running. Also, wouldn't spin the fan when running.
People don't want to pay for anything, therefore we get...
> barely maintained, obscure, ... have limited 3rd party compatibility
Building anything really polished that isn't those things is a huge undertaking that someone would have to pay for.
Electron piggybacks on the massive web ecosystem which is funded by SaaS, advertising, and surveillance so it lacks the abandonware problem. Unfortunately it's also not really built for the role of desktop or mobile UI layer and so you get a bloated, insecure, slow mess when you try to shoehorn it in there.
We don't get what we won't pay for.
Can you name a few?
Same, but I switched to Flutter. Native performance, declarative UI, and while I do still have dependencies, they’re much easier to manage and the scope of individual packages/widgets are much smaller/tighter/focused imo.
I mean it has more to do with NPM than Javascript or Node itself, NPM and its "small package that do a single thing" bull philosophy, and the fact that multiple versions of the same package are installed in the dependency tree, because NPM allows it, instead of rejecting package conflicts, like Composer or any sane package manager.
Conflicts should be resolved by the developers, upstream, and package managers shouldn't install trees of dependencies, dependencies should be flat.
It has become almost impossible to audit anything with NPM, when you have the same package installed 50 times with 50 different versions locally.
I really like working with TypeScript, but that is the pain point that always comes up.
I remember that a few years ago there was a lot of debate about whether IOTA was truly decentralized. Advocates were arguing basically that "it's not completely decentralized now but it will be soon". Well I guess we know were we're at right now.
I don't want the innovation to get lost in the bathwater though: the tangle datastructure was novel. Not an expert, but it was designed to allow for minimal proof of work while retaining some hashed auditability and tamper resistance. I think the key idea would be that you help hash several other blocks into transactions and then your transaction will get hashed by a few other workers. It didn't require heavy POW so it was more suitable for an embedded device to perform on the edge.
Also, rolling your own POW and making claims about that POW isn't some trivial thing. Hashcash was created in 1997 which is eleven years before bitcoin. Rolling your own crypto system isn't just something where you can just make one up and use in a production environment.
I'll add it to the list of absolutely revolutionary blockchain technologies that are going to change the world [working implementation is left as an exercise for the reader].
- iota co-founder
Drivel like the above has long outed Iota as an absolute scam. The ternary business was some mixture of (a) bamboozling non-technical users, (b) distraction from its other failings, and (c) sheer delusion.
Iota pushers hand-wave with slogans like "gets faster the more people use it" and "replace the central coordinator with voting (someday?)" but without actual security. Whereas PoW has a well-understood security model (see 51% attacks) Iota hopes you won't notice that basically nothing can be decided without the central coordinator.
And then it gets worse. Iota-without-the-coordinator washes its hands of consistency. Individual nodes would have to pray they are connected to good actors, and then through some unexplained governance scheme, deduce the consensus state.
In short: iota is unsuitable as any kind of distributed ledger.
>- iota co-founder
lol they seriously say that? For those who aren't aware...
You get e (2.71828...) as the optimal base when you're trying to minimize the product of a) the number of symbols you're using and b) the number of symbols needed to represent a number.
Once there are other factors that are significant, it's no longer the optimum. And indeed, in the real world, you care about the difficulty of implementing base-x vs base-y logic in hardware, the installed ecosystem for computing in that base, etc, which (to put it mildly) heavily favors base-2, even for domains where one subproblem is more naturally expressed in trinary.
The tangle, like trits and many other IOTAisms, appear to be the perfect basis for a scam: too complicated for non-experts to fully understand yet just enough plausibility to sell it.
Even if the creators were not conciously trying to create a scam, so far it has been indistinguishable from one.
(I'm interested in a peer review of tangle as just searching for it only uncovers page upon page of marketing drivel.)
I saw one which claimed it was "impossible to 51% because it's a DAG and both chains just end up on the network"
No. That means either you don't have consistency (which means 51% attacks could be theoretically implemented with way less than 51% of the hash rate) or that the consensus of which transaction are valid can be 51%ed.
Iota is even worse. Doesn't even try to have a distributed consensus, just uses a centralized validator.
Actually wouldn't any sort of structure that prevents double spending have to be a dag? In order to prevent double spending you need to put transactions in topological order (to know how much money the account has). If you can do that your data structure is a DAG.
I think that's generous - using a java 32-bit integer to emulate a single 'trit' in your software stack is bound to be hysterically less efficient, and effectively rule out any embedded/IoT use.
I know the stock answer to that was "we're working on ternary hardware too", but that just adds more questions - why are you redesigning the world from the ground up here? Are you going to rewrite entire embedded operating systems in ternary when you have this chip? How on earth is that going to help adoption by developers?
> Didn't stop them from making a fortune with pre-mined coins during the cryptocurrency boom.
Indeed, and there was some sort of spat a few weeks ago that likely saw at least one of the founders continue to fleece the community.
If you ask what that even means and why it would be better, or even different from binary since it's just a different base of numbers, they will either do some sort of circular logic or just get angry.
It's kind of mind blowing to have conversations with people who are heavily invested in something emotionally that falls apart with a single question.
This doesn't even get into the inherent centralization or the fact that no one can actually explain how the decentralization will actually work.
It isn't even comfortable realizing there are so many people like that out there.
There's one place ternary logic already exists—the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory found in network switches. You need to be able to put essentially "trit vectors" on the address bus (think e.g. "0110??10?1") to describe the search queries you want your CAM to execute; and the CAM itself needs to be able to store trits so that it can represent bits that "don't matter" and could match a search query with any value in that position. (The "third value" here acts like a NULL does in an RDBMS, but comparing equal to everything rather than unequal.)
That's... pretty much the only existing real-world use I know of for ternary, though.
For a non-real-world argument: ternary is closest to the theoretical "base e" that would have the best numeric packing factor, and therefore be able to represent numbers in the fewest digits. If you're incredibly space-constrained but only somewhat CPU-constrained, it might make sense to encode numbers as ternary when persisting them, as a kind of compression; and then to persist them to something else that stores natively in ternary (like an imaginary NAND cell design half-way between SLC and MLC with three voltage levels per cell.) But that's probably nothing to do with what IOTA's doing with it, if they're using ternary as a live representation for computation.
Following on with your discussion of Ternary in networking networking switches, I think Balanced Ternary can be mathematically elegant way to represent numbers. We shouldn't completely dismiss it just because currently we have massive path dependencies on binary.
However in the context of a highly ambitious project, such as IOTA, which is attempting to integrate with a large number of deployed systems that use binary, it is a mistake to switch to ternary. None of the existing tooling works, you have to write custom software for stuff that in binary have already been built and well tested.
tl;dr Doing one impossible thing is hard enough, never try to do two impossible things at the same time.
When discussing ternary computation, I always see people talking about representation and storage. In these aspects, ternary can indeed be more elegant and efficient than binary.
I never see any discussion about the complexity of the physical circuits, though. From the little I have seen (see [1]) it seems that using ternary circuits for computation will never be a good idea. Even though you'd need fewer wires to carry information, that advantage is more than cancelled by the increased complexity of the computation circuits themselves (those papers compare specifically binary and ternary adders and multipliers).
[1]:
I rode the crypto train for a few years but got off because of the ridiculousness.
I believe it's a variant on the popular cryptocurrency business plan of "if I throw up enough smoke, I can tell you that behind the smoke there's a beautiful shining city that just as soon as the smoke clears, you can go live in forever and ever, so you'd better buy in now before it becomes overcrowded!"
For this plan to work, you want the quality smoke, you know, thick, luscious, oleaginous, billowing and colorful and perhaps even interesting in its own right. On that front, this "ternary-computation" smoke is pretty brilliant stuff.
Reddit had a massive issue with iota astroturfing.
Facepalm
This always happens with crypto - there's a hack, some people lose money and then the community vibe goes out the window and there's software patches, transactional rollback attempts, network forks, and so on.
Part of the risk of a decentralised autonomous system is that it's DECENTRALISED AND AUTONOMOUS. If you lose money because of a hack THATS PART OF YOUR RISK PROFILE. DEAL WITH IT.
Having a centralized node with a single authority mitigates some of the uncomfortableness of the original hack, and might get some or all of the money back - but the cost of that is undermining the entire network ethos. This currency is a single issuing authority who can dictate the rules when it suits them and pull the plug if things get uncomfortable.
If you set up a libertarian community in which everything is privatized, and then one day your home catches on fire, but you don't pay for firefighting service, it sucks to be you, but is your neighbor* going to just say "that's part of your risk profile, deal with it"? Laws and philosophies are one thing, but there are predictions you can make about the actions of people separate from that, and so your rules and abstractions have to be compatible.
*who shares a wall
In general I don't believe in trying to hedge against everything going wrong. I want to be rich in the future where money can buy, say, immortality or space travel, not in the Mad Max future where money just makes you a target.
You can wake up one day to a severe ECDS bug and bitcoin will have to rollback anything that gets compromised afterwards (assuming it isn't a bug that makes the scheme trivially crackable and hence invalidates everything from the genesis block) as they patch up the software. It's not an unforeseen problem. You have to rely on the fact that the attackers also don't compromise your media outreach capabilities so you have no way of informing the world that the chain is no longer secure.
[1]: https://blog.iota.org/coordinator-part-1-the-path-to-coordic...
https://github.com/iotaledger/trinity-wallet/pull/2565/files...
The commit removes these lines:
- const script = document.createElement('script');
- script.src = 'https://cdn.moonpay.io/moonpay-sdk.js';
-
- document.write(script.outerHTML);People trying to make a currency involving large sums of money don't even have the security controls to check they are not loading malicous dependencies from npm! This is not some fancy crypto hack, this is plain old boring compromised dependency from an ecosystem with a reputation for high profile compromises.
Your definition of crypto currency and decentralised currency is conflated too.
> 1. The system does not require a central authority, its state is maintained through distributed consensus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#Formal_definiti...
Code not deployed and probably never tested (perhaps never even worked) does not count.
Furthermore, you can run like a consortium style crypto currency, where its jointly controlled by multiple organisations.
Hell even bitcoin doesn't have a great notion of verifability (verify what? No double spending? Lets hope your opponent doesn't control 33% of the hash power.). Central-db systems can issue recipts (like humans have been doing for thousands of years). Centralized cyrptocurrencies basically offer the same protection at best and much less at worse.
That depends really - some people are deterred from taking real medicine by homeopaths, and there have been a few high profile deaths where people had been persuaded that homeopathy was superior to, say, mainstream cancer treatments.
Further, even if you believe that homeopathy is somehow a 'useful' placebo, that doesn't justify any of the claims of efficacy that are made about it.
Unfortunately yes, it is quite mainstream and there are billion-dollar businesses making money from the gullible with this stuff.
(*in some cases the placebo effect appears even with a known placebo)
I'm in the homeopathy-is-a-load-of-horseshit camp, not the gives-two-shits-about-placebos camp.
When companies get the dilution wrong people die. Here's an example of a company that got warned once, and then went on to get it wrong again, which killed at least 10 children and harmed hundreds more. This company spent years ignoring all the warnings.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/fda-homeopathic-teet...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-babie...
Instead recommending people to take crazy doses of supplements, making entirely crazy claims like "cures strep throat" or "can prevent infections" or generally pushing unregulated supplements is absolutely preying upon the weak, weakening the ability of medical providers to actually do their job and is nothing more than naked profiteering by private companies. Anybody supporting or pushing homeopathy is immoral.
So that meets with your approval?
Obviously you can't say something is plain water whether or not it is - surely the placebo effect requires the recipient to think there is medication, and isn't it common knowledge that something like a bitter taste enhances it?
* This has not been determined to cure or prevent any condition or disease by the FDA. Please note that Prop 65 of California law requires us to disclosure that this packaging may contain a known carcinogen. Long disclaimers are really hard for the average consumer to read and parse in any meaningful way and by using both small text and dense fonts manufacturers are able to make disclaimers extremely ineffective.
Legal does not imply ethical or moral.
AFAIK they would also need the standard FDA disclaimer of
>This/these statement(s) have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
edit: apparently there's an exemption for homeopathic medicine, so they don't need it. That's a shame. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quack_Miranda_Warning#Homeopat...
That's not a reflection on CBD itself.
Texas specifically is working on adding legal requirements around purity testing and what claims can be made. While there's a downside of cost I think that strategy is the most worthwhile.
Read the labels of some of them. In some sort of bizarre double-fraud twist, there's actually some "homeopathic" products that contain meaningful levels of the active ingredients, and are basically labeled "homeopathic" the same way the words "organic" or "gluten free" get tossed about with wild abandon on products that it should be absolutely irrelevant for. (I have a picture somewhere in my family photo pile of water being labeled as "gluten-free".) It's like homeopathy, stripped of the idea that the more you dilute the better, or, homeopathy without the homeopathy.
This isn't unique to cryptocurrency, although the permanence of crypto transactions makes it pretty concerning there. Similar Magecart type attacks have been stealing credit card numbers from websites including British Airways, Ticketmaster, or Macy's, right off the checkout page.
Most sites still would have no idea if this were to happen to them today.
That’s why I’ve developed Enchanted Security (https://enchantedsecurity.com/) - a client-side firewall that tracks the network requests and even blocks malicious ones. It’s like a network firewall but running on your users’ browsers. It can run on other JS platforms too, like Electron or React Native, which are commonly used for crypto wallets. Get in touch if you’re interested in learning more.
I know exchanges use 1 big wallet, and internally keep track of who owns what. So in practice you would still be able to trade, just not able to add or request funds.
But if all exchanges block trading, nothing can happen to the price can it?
Yes. Trading generally happens off-chain, simply by changing account balances in exchange's database. Actual on-chain transactions don't take place until funds are withdrawn from the exchange (which is why they should not be kept there for long - obvious hacking risk).
All the major exchanges are showing volume, so yes it's still being traded.
>But if all exchanges block trading, nothing can happen to the price can it?
Not really. All that does is remove an "official" price, and make spread/confidence interval bigger. OTC trades (with trusted parties since the network is down) is always an option, so are derivatives like futures/options/cfds.
I don't think cryptos will ever take off without widespread institutional and gubernatorial support. Governments will probably issue cryptos themselves eventually. They are an opportunity for the government to create a centralized Federal Retail Bank that reduces the amount of rents and subsidies captured by commercial banks. Every citizen would have a free digital checking account, fully backed by the issuing government. When someone wants a loan, commercial banks and fintech companies would get temporary access to user data to compete on providing that loan. The data would only be used for that loan in particular, and it would be illegal to use it for any other purposes, or to retain it after the loan is done.
The government cryptos would have to be as impermeable to hackers as your current digital bank account with (insert Big Bank here). Obviously, while such a system has tangible consumer benefits, it wouldn't be nearly as libertarian as Bitcoin.
There’s no wallet code on a flash drive that you can lose. There’s no weird pseudo-bank. There’s no mining (which adds huge transaction costs to the network).
If a new VC-backed company called Mt. Zox said “keep your cryptos with us, we have the latest in crypto security. Here are all the virtually incomprehensible protections we have. Trust us, we’re better than the Other Guys” how can you fully evaluate them? Even if they have great standards on paper, how do you know that they will be upheld in practice? How do you know that there’s no backdoor for hackers or company founders to use? Even if you do all your research before investing, you’re still a sitting duck with the tail risk of capricious losses.
My point isn’t that full understanding is a prerequisite for widespread crypto adoption. However, there is a “tangibility-trust” axis with currencies. The less tangible the currency is, the more trust is required in the issuing institution.
Gold is more tangible than dollars. Physical dollars are more tangible than digital dollars. Digital dollars are more tangible than cryptos. Bitcoin took a step down in both intangibility and institutional trust. It is, essentially, a currency backed by full faith in speculation, illicit activity, asset hiding, and under the radar transactions.
Side note: I changed “trust something” to “trust a currency” in my OP to be more specific.
You’re making the error of talking about cryptocurrency from the network perspective instead of the ecosystem perspective. You can compare a cryptocurrency with a financial backbone. A bank/credit card/any financial service can be sitting in front of both a cryptocurrency network or the current financial network and users wouldn’t see a difference (well except lower fees)
Don’t forget the massive cost to compensate miners for all the time, electricity, and computing power that they use. If you amortize those costs, they far surpass even Amex’s credit card fees. Also, what’s with the whole >50% control condition? So now I have to worry about a top secret Russian organization with dozens of 160 IQ scientists racing to create a quantum computer that can overwhelm some/all cryptos and bring wealth to the motherland? I’m half-joking, but that’s the kind of technological weirdness that I’m not comfortable with, much less the average person.
Wait a minute... I thought cryptocurrencies were immune to manipulation, and decentralized?! /s
If a single org can shut down a cryptocurrency, you might as well use PayPal.
You don't want decentralized anonymous immutable transactions for your money.
You really, really don't.
Thats not really an argument to make. Maybe you can say you "don't need" and make some arguments for that, but telling people what they don't want.. Doesn't seem helpful .
Also
> very basic principle of a cryptocurrency The BlockChain is a very good principle. But again I don't think you're sure the difference.
I stand by my statement. People certainly think they want those things, but they're wrong. Because they want them only until something like this happens and their money is gone because of an error someone else made. Then they suddenly want a way to get back their money a whole lot more, but it's impossible because of exactly those things they thought they wanted.
> The BlockChain is a very good principle.
It's a good principle for getting distributed, (possibly anonymous) immutable transactions. It's an absolutely terrible idea to apply that to money. I don't think anyone has yet found a practical application it's better suited for than all the alternatives.
> But again I don't think you're sure the difference.
I'm sure I understand the difference better than you.
But a) that's very much not how people treat cryptocurrencies now, and b) I don't see how you could replicate some other features of cash, namely that you can fairly dependably protect your cash by investing in physical security, and that there is inherently no such thing as a vulnerability that can be exploited at scale.
If you've generated your private keys offline and store them on paper, that paper can be treated the same as cash of the same value, and secured in a similar mechanism
> there is inherently no such thing as a vulnerability that can be exploited at scale
Counterfeiting has been a problem for cash holders for a long time. It's definitely a more severe vulnerability for crypto holders tho.
There are, many. In the past 30 years, most European countries have gone through at least one monetary reform that made previously issued banknotes obsolete. The first wave was USSR's and its satellites' collapse in 1990s (with very unfavorable exchange rates to new currencies), and the second wave was the adoption of Euro in 2000s and 2010s.
Germany's central bank converts the obsolete Deutsche Mark to Euro to this day, France stopped supporting the French franc in 2012. Full list: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/exchange/html/index.en.html
So if your elderly relatives overreacted and hid a stash of francs on the day planes hit WTC towers, and you discover it now, the money is worthless.
It's the combination of those features (which happens to be the selling point of cryptocurrencies) that is problematic.
Because if transactions are not anoymous, you can (at least in principle) track down a thief and make them give back the money. And it they're not decentralized, the central authority can be made to add a reversing transaction.
But there's no way to implement anything decentralized, anonymous, and immutable on top of a base layer which is not those things.
...and when that code has a bug, we're fucked.
And until then we've spent a ridiculous amount of effort to get what we already have.
But to the extent you want immutability, you can have it this way.
Last time this happened with Ethereum for example, they split the chain in Ethereum Classic and the "New" Ethereum. Also not an ideal scenario. At least they are transparent/actively working on fixing this issue.
That they have been encouraging people to invest in and speculate on for years now.
Or is it more likely that markets of speculators aren't rational?
Hard for the price to crash when they shut down the network 25 minutes after the hack.
The entire domain has been totally taken over by scams and ruined by get rich quick idiots. The bubble killed cryptocurrency.