Monero Dev Meeting Note Highlights – 2017-11-05
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hyclooks like meeting time now. yes?
serhackyea, rehrar should start it
rehrarNow?
rehrarOh shoot, that's right daylight savings thing.
sarangDST is dumb
suraeNoetherworld's. worst. policy.
rehrarye
sarangIt got even worse when the U.S. congress decided to change when DST happened
rehrar1. Greetings
sarangI was working at a government time lab that had to deal with that crap
ArticMineHi
rehrarWho all is here?
vtnerdhello
hychi
sarangsarang
serhackhello
rehrarluigi1111, moneromooo, endogenic, othe, fluffypony
rehrarping all the people!
endogenichyc vtnerd sarang suraeNoether
serhacksgp, cryptochangements, erciccione
endogenicpigeons
suraeNoetherhowdy howdy
moneromooohere
pigeonshola, lets go
rehrar2. Brief review of what's been completed since the previous meeting
rehrarWhat's been going down these past two weeks guys? For those who missed last meeting, you can update on the past month.
sgpHey
hycI suppose the obvious is 11.1 was released
rehrarMRL can give a brief mini-update if they want too, i know you guys have your own meetings, but just so everyone is in the loop :slightly_smiling_face:
rehrarye! How'd we feel the release went? smoother than the last time? it was a bit rough then.
hycprobably moneromooo should give an opinion there. seemed slightly smoother but we still had some cmake/build issues
hycstuff PR'd to master that should also have been PR'd to release and was overlooked
moneromoooWell, there were not man changes. But pony had some trouble, yes.
moneromoooNot sure what those were right now though.
suraeNoetherat MRL, on my end, I've been making steady progress on multisig. the description needed to be expanded to take into account multiple inputs and outputs, and I'm including ringCT as a matter of completeness… I've been comparing code as I go. no major obstacles yet, but that probably just means i'm not totally understanding the code yet, but moneromooo and luigi have made themselves available for questions.
rehrarYe. It'd be good to get his perspective. We can discuss that next meeting if he's here.
suraeNoetherin addition to that, the grad student at U-Michigan Dearborn, Jeffrey Quesnelle, with whom I have a draft of a zk lit review paper in the wings… he contacted me again. as part of his master's thesis, he's essentially doing a zcash-link a la monerolink
suraeNoetherhe wanted my thoughts, I shared it with fluffypony, we gave him a bit of feedback. I don't know how public he wants the document, so I'm not sharing it around
sarangDo we want to say anything about SPECTRE and other blockchain topology constructions?
suraeNoetherbut it's… interesting. over 30% of zcash transactions are linkable under his model, and although zcash provides a level of plausible deniability, quesnelle's approach doesn't suffer similar sensitivity/specificity problems that monerolink suffered, so
hyccurious to see that. doesn't that imply that "zero knowledge" is a misnomer?
suraeNoetherwell
suraeNoetheryou can put your credit card in a zero knowledge black box
suraeNoetherbut if you took a picture and posted it on facebook after you take it out
serhackDear guys, a message from micheal: we still need to change repository name from Sekura
suraeNoetherthe proofs in zcash themselves reveal nothing about the information embedded inside
suraeNoetherbut they glue this zk system to this transparent bitcoin-style system
rehrarSarang, sure. Give us a quick SPECTRE treatment.
hycso this is because they have transparent addresses still
suraeNoetheressentially, they suffer from their own version of our EABE attack
suraeNoetherbut you could call it TZT
hycmakes sense
suraeNoetheras far as spectre goes: sompolinsky, the author, and i had some brief correspondence, and he confirmed my ideas on bringing it into constant-time, and he confirmed an annoyance-based attack using that trick. i haven't finished coding up a prototype of it, though, because i've been working on multisig. i have some ideas on how to mitigate the annoyance-based attack, but… sarang and i discussed it a bit and
suraeNoetherwe aren't sure if any blocks can ever be rejected in a spectre system
ArticMineIs there also a timing element here?
suraeNoetherarcticmine as far as i know the analysis inolved short-time-period transactions
sarangWell the definitions for transaction rejection are pretty straightforward
suraeNoetherif you mean about the zcash-link
suraeNoetherthe validity of a block is not relevant, all blocks are accepted, all blocks find their place, in spectre… but putting a block deep into the dag causes everyone to take time to process where to place it, and worse any transactions inside are extremely likely to precede transactions after it, so you are burning people's CPU time to place a block that you suspect is already bogus
suraeNoetherso, spectre has some things that require investigation, like difficulty and mining, etc, incentives for attacking the network…
sarangYeah it struck me as almost a sort of DoS attack
suraeNoetherand that's my end of MRL in the past few weeks: multisig and spectre. what about you, sarang?
sarangSo something that has been intriguing me is a block level-based construction
sarangit adds a little more complexity to the idea of block pointers using the statistics of block headers
serhackgreat update suraeNoether
sarangThe idea being that information about a certain number of blocks at given levels can allow a full node to prove to a light node information about its full blockchain without requiring full verification of all blocks
suraeNoetheroooh
sarangSo ideally, it takes care of "ignoring old blocks" and replaces it with "ignoring a lot of old blocks, but in a distributed way"
sarangThis is not the first academic attempt at this
sarangBut earlier attempts had subtle vulnerabilities to attacks
sarangSo full nodes act as provers, and light nodes act as verifiers
sarangIt requires minimal changes to the block pointer structure
suraeNoetheroh, man, fantastic, knaccc and hyc and i have been having these ping-pong conversations on how safe it is, for example, to prune out range proofs or even more information that that alone… knowledge of statistical distribution of headers would provide a really strong statistical method of guaranteeing you are throwing away "sufficiently old" data or data with a sufficient amount of PoW behind it
sarangIt's not even light nodes throwing away old data. It's being able to be provided with (potentially conflicting) subsets of the blockchain and be assured that an honest full node provided you with the correct one
sarangEssentially a "subset version" of Nakamoto consensus
hycmight help with nodes getting stuck on alternate forks too
suraeNoetheroh, man
sarangThe light nodes are always provided with a certain number of recent blocks
sarangand a certain number of blocks at each level, up to a point
sarangso it scales logarithmically
sarangThe more I'm investigating the literature, the more I love it
suraeNoethersarang, how would you feel about organizing a youtube video lecture on these approaches? can be as long or as short as you like, i'm thinking white-board talk
sarangI've never done such a thing, but I could work something up
sarangProblem is the papers on this have some of the worst explanations of the data structures I've seen in a while
sarangI'm working up some better ones
sgpThat would help people like me
rehrarI can help sarang.
sarangIt's one of those things that, when diagrammed correctly, is actually really intuitive
rehrarWith the videos.
sarangsweet
sarangAnyway, I've used up my time here =p
rehrarOk, anyone else with updates?
hycgood stuff MRL
rehrarPing Jaquee also
rehrarIndeed. Round of applause for MARK.
rehrarMRL. :P
rehrarAutocorrect.
endogenic+1
suraeNoetherOH! one more thing about MRL: Sarang and I on monday are contacting the chair of a CS/Math department at a local 4-year university near me about a summer 2018 cryptocurrency workshop. I'm thinking 5-10 undergrads with nontrivial programming experience and at least one heavy math class under their belt (could be linear algebra, could be differential equations, could be intro to crypto but i think that's
suraeNoethergenerally heavier than early undergrad), for a 3-4 week course
suraeNoetherI'm looking into seeing if the school would be willing to match funds raised by the community or something like that, and I certainly would donate
hycsounds great
suraeNoetherok, now i'm done
suraeNoethersorry for taking up so much space during the meeting this week. :P heh
rehrarMaybe open donations up to the community to give too? Just a bit maybe.
endogenicrehrar: questions ok?
hycshoot first, ask permission later
rehrarOf course.
endogenicanyone know what's left to do on zmq before can be merged? just rebase?
hycclient side PR was just resubmitted today
moneromoooThe remaining patch was rebased. I think it does mention some testing is needed though.
endogenicoh that's great
endogenicoh one thing
endogenici wanted to ask if we should have MRL review the kovri+monero address exchange
moneromoooWhat is the kovri+monero address exchange ?
endogenicyou n nonimal were discussing it recently
moneromoooAh, how to know where to connect to in the first place ?
endogenicmm
sarang??
vtnerdendogenic : the zmq server can already be accessed/used (trunk/master builds)
endogenicvtnerd: i am so behind the times T_T
endogenicsarang: it seemed fairly trivial to me
endogenicbut then again i've been… trained… not to take such things lightly… :P
endogenicmore confirmations = better
rehrarOk. Can we move on, or is there anything else? :)
endogenicoh yes and can we have flare for sarang and surae on reddit? i might miss their comments w/o having pressed the friend button :P
endogeniccontinues going down holiday wishlist…
dEBRUYNEendogenic: Sure, if they want a custom flair they can message u/shy
dEBRUYNEendogenic: Do you want to give an update on MyMonero?
endogenichmm
endogenicsure
serhackgreat
endogenici dunno if you guys know but tficharmers has been doing some design work on the official gui app
endogeniche also created a github issue with the feature suggestion of being able to work in other world currencies
endogenicand was gracious enough to work through the design with some other contributors a couple months ago
hycvia plugin?
endogenici got around to implementing that in the iOS (Swift) app and am in the process of building it out on the JS side
endogenici just tentatively grabbed the xmr exchange rates from cryptocompare.com
endogenicvia client side polling while i wait for server to provide rates matrix
endogenici've been daydreaming about the idea of transpiling some of my Swift strictly View code to JS
endogenicsince we do have View.web, StackedNavigationView.web, etc…
endogenicbut that's hardly priority :P
serhackI'm using it too
endogeniccryptocompare?
serhackye
endogenicthey seemed really cool from their site
tficharmersendogenic: cheers, but just to confirm that I haven’t looked at the gui for a while. I have spent the last few months on Moneroforcash.com
rehrarOk. Anything more endogenic?
endogenicoh i meant "semi recently" :P
endogenicyou submitted that whole high lvl design review thing
rehrarGuys, I'm terribly sorry, but something very important just came up that is going to require me to split for fifteen minutes.
endogenicyeah i mean i guess everyone probably already knows that the last update I heard from fp was that Apple said they received the MDC DUNS number but there was an issue in their developer portal or some such so he had to email them and is waiting to hear
rehrarWe can do ticket discussion if you want in my absence.
endogenicMDC DUNS number mind you
endogenicMyMonero DUNS number still no status on
endogenicon receipt of *
hycmooo should probably take over for ticket discussion
endogenicanyway anyone's free to take the floor
rehrarYe. Mooo? Wanna take from here plz?
moneromoooWell, those are usually "what do I merge ?", so since pony isn't here…
moneromoooI guess I could take the opportunity to shill the multisig branch, if someone wants to test ^_^
endogenicyes let's hear moneromooo's holiday wishlist
moneromoooI don't have anything in particular to say about the pending patches, sorry.
rehrarSorry all. Cya.
endogenicmoneromooo: can you fill sarang in on the kovri address thing?
moneromoooIt'd be an equivalent to the current A records pointing to… the seed nodes I think ?
hycafter that, we're on (4) Any additional meeting items
moneromoooIf using kovri, I ugess you don't want to be using DNS for this ?
hycso we should have some i2p seed nodes?
moneromoooOnce you've got a (honest) peer, you can pull peer lists off it.
moneromoooYes, they should be on both clear and i2p.
dEBRUYNEmoneromooo: re: multsig, is there anything in particular you want tested?
endogenicmoneromooo: not possible to do the same experiment twice
hycI think there ought to be a threshold that cancels out his previous 1-patch contribution and removes his flair
serhackshould I post anything related to my latest updates?
moneromooodEBRUYNE: I suppose it's mostly "everything" :)
dEBRUYNEAll right, so test and see if anything breaks basically :-P
moneromoooYes.
hycat least you only need to recompile the wallet. can use on existing testnet
moneromoooThere are things you can't do, like signing messages for exmaple.
endogenicmoneromooo: i wonder if testing multisig can be opened up to a hackathon
endogenicmaybe via surae
dEBRUYNEmoneromooo: you mean signing messages with the multisig address?
moneromoooYes.
dEBRUYNEAll right
dEBRUYNEserhack: go ahead :)
endogenicoops not surae, sgp
hycready to buy 10 lambos with testnet wallet and 2/3 multisig.
serhackhttps://imgur.com/a/iRcAw
serhackmy latest job, I am working in redesign monero payment box
sgp@endogenic can you elaborate further?
endogenicsgp: i figure you might have a number of programmer friends who are interested in Monero or privacy etc
endogenicaren't there applications of programmatic access to multisig functions?
moneromoooCan you rephrase that ?
sgpI haven't really looked into running a hackathon before but one of my firends has done well in many of them
endogenicsgp: it's ezpz you just get some companies who have a technology to promote to participate and purchase the donuts and coffee :P
hycoh, one point of clarification - surae is still working on his multisig review. so what's relation btw surae's work and the current PR?
endogenicand students have to pick one tech from N companies or something
sgp@endogeneic let's talk more about this outside the meeting
endogenicmeeting is over!
endogenic:P
hychm would still like an answer to my question
serhack:slightly_smiling_face:
hycand do we confirm next meeting 2 weeks from today?
TinusMarsany thoughts on the bulletproof paper?
hycmany. still digesting.
TinusMarsok
ArticMineIt needs to be evaluated by the MRL
rehrarBack. Super sorry. I see we still kinda going.
sarangYeah
sarangLike all new developments, we are evaluating cautiously
TinusMarsok thanks
rehrarNext meeting 19th?
moneromooohyc: AFAIK, surae and sarang worked on proofs of security, and now comparing existing multisig with their paper.
sarangaye
serhackyeah rehrar
hycmoneromooo: ok cool. so PR can't be merged until review is complete
Sources and notes
- Meeting log: Overview and Logs for the Dev Meeting Held on 2017-11-05, getmonero.org. The official post carried the raw log and pointed readers to Hello Monero for the overview.
- Original Hello Monero URL slug recovered from the Wayback Machine index; the original page content did not survive, so this reconstruction carries the log as archived by the Monero Project.