Bitcoin Core v24.0 released

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes-24.0.md

Credit: Many

Notable changes:

  • mempoolfullrbf
  • sendall RPC aimed at sweeping a wallet
  • reproducable guix builds
  • some wallet RPCs now consume and emit Miniscript expressions

SGX resilience in production

https://sgx.fail

Credit: Many

Intel SGX is a “secure enclave” implementation that uses special hardware to run sensitive code. This study examines how effectively SGX users can mitigate the numerous side channel attacks on SGX.

Merklize All The Things

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-November/021182.html

Credit: Salvatore Ingala

This is a proposal for new opcodes which would support a propose-refute smart contracting system. In this system users commit to a program and an execution transcript evaluating the next contract state from the starting state. Computations are bonded and any user can challenge that the committed execution transcript matches running the committed program on the starting state, via a binary search procedure.

Channel jamming

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2022-November/003754.html

Credit: Antoine Riard

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2022-November/003740.html

Credit: Clara Shikhelman and Sergei Tikhomirov

In the lightning network channels in the process of routing a payment dedicate liquidity and an HTLC slot to the payment for as long as it takes to resolve. This ends up being a way to grief channels: send payments with intent to fail them later. Two DoS methods are to (1) rapidly create and fail payments along a route in order to tie up channel resources and (2) create long-lived payments that eventually fail. Mitigation is an active area of research which includes adding fees to try a payment (not refunded if it fails) and devising a scoring algorithm for incoming payments to try increase the probability that routed payments succeed in a timely manner.