alin.apt

i put the “crypto” in “cryptocurrency.”

head of cryptography at @aptoslabs

💍 + 👶 + 🏍️ = ❤️

[alin.apt @alinush]

How confidential transfers work👇

[alin.apt @alinush]

> what if (in the extreme case) there’s just one key in one server signing and it’s all just theatre?

I don’t think you can prevent this though. How? A single signer can always emulate a t-out-of-n system.

> ika can already be used today with a public user share

But then you’re agreeing with what I’m saying above: there are settings where users should not be encumbered with managing secrets.

[alin.apt @alinush]

Earlier in May, when I looked at NEAR’s MPC, I was a bit skeptical: 5-out-of-8, no TEE hardening, no proactive refresh.

But since then it has improved a lot: 11-out-of-16 and TEE hardening!

This is very nice to see! 👏👏

[alin.apt @alinush]

> what are your thoughts on the protocol being synchronous

On its own, it’s fine / can be engineered around.

> having no public verifiablity

It produces a signature at the end. (Or it doesn’t.) That’s enough public verifiability for me.

> and no identifiable abort

This is what puzzles me and is filed under “Concerning” in the post. Without IA, it would seem failures must be manually investigated so the bad nodes can be removed. It would also seem DoS by one bad node is easily possible. But I may be missing something.

> guaranteed output delivery so in practice the system isn’t robust even against one dishonest node

Robustness would be even better than IA, but I’d settle for IA.

> i think we disagreed before on cait-sith security proof method which our team considered unreliable unlike uc (and i’m not aware of any security proofs for nears modifications),

I would assume a proof exists should the current one have issues. Not too worried here.

> and i get that people haven’t realized yet that zero-trust and requiring the user is a basic requirement for decentralized mpc (weird but ok)

I think you and I sparred on this topic a bit in the past 😄. I think the opposite: involving users is a mistake in many settings where users stand to lose access by losing their secret key material. But that’s a separate discussion, hehe.

> but the points above about robustness and public verifiability are very basic protocol design flaws in a decentralized system don’t you think?

Only the lack of IA would make me uneasy to deploy such a system. Very curious how they deal with misbehavior.

I don’t yet get what kind of public verifiability you are referring to.

[alin.apt @alinush]

@_bendersgreat_ Great!!

[alin.apt @alinush]

Ugh, I meant; https://t.co/SYGTLcgxzv

[alin.apt @alinush]

You can read my take on why proactive refresh seems hard in their set up: https://t.co/neth6C74Xe

[alin.apt @alinush]

You can also read about how they modify the additive key derivation from Groth-Shoup’21 here: https://t.co/neth6C7CMM

[Doug Colkitt @0xdoug]

6/ There's been this persistent notion that formal verification isn't worth doing because "a spec can just as easily have a bug as code".

We decided to test that with real empirical evidence. And the answer is an emphatic *NO*. Especially in an age of agentic coding

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

I am operating under an assumption at this point that just everything is public, no information is private anymore

[alin.apt @alinush]

Fair.

But it actually has to *solve* them, no?

"We replicate your secret data on all our 7 private servers" is _not_ privacy tech. It's what privacy tech was invented to improve upon*.

It's also a liability in the AI age.

*aaaaand I've made myself sound like an LLM, lol

[alin.apt @alinush]

I remember a cryptocurrency space that used to have higher ideals.

Satoshi did not set out to “solve users’ problems today.”

What Sandeep would call “larpers” were the early adopters from 2012 and before, whom Satoshi won over, and who set out to establish the field we’re all in today.

None of them built pragmatic solutions.

There was nothing pragmatic about Ethereum. Or Zcash.

It was due to their complete disregard for pragmatism that we’ve made it this far (scalable BFT, fast ZK) and we now stand to solve **tomorrow’s** problems (censorship, surveillance).

The f*** outta here with “today’s problems.”

[Sandeep | POL Shiller @sandeepnailwal]

What @ilblackdragon and NEAR team has built is a pragmatic solution which solves users’ problems “today” and such solutions win the users, technically perfect solutions win larpers (that too for a short time, you can never satisfy them for long)

[alin.apt @alinush]

@chronear Good one! 😆😆

Look, this isn't necessarily about NEAR, who is otherwise doing nice things too (https://t.co/axCwCR387w), this is about the spirit of our industry: don't build castles out of mud (https://t.co/qPrb3RL3Wy).

[alin.apt @alinush]

Narratives matter, sure.

But doesn’t it also matter what they’re built on?

A small bar fight over not building privacy castles out of mud is worth it, IMO.

…given how many folks in the space are working their ass of to do better than: “entrust your privacy to my convenient assumption that none of my nodes will be compromised”

[alin.apt @alinush]

I actually like NEAR's MPC / chain abstraction. It's got some rough edges (https://t.co/oV7JXPeaNv), but you can chisel them in time.

Plus, NEAR just closed the gap on running MPC nodes in TEEs, which is a step in the right direction (https://t.co/JY58zpT16C). Kudos.

That being said, I think it fair to criticize the security of a so-called "private shard" and to question the dangerous direction it might take us into.

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

https://t.co/GAHmqZMUUy

[alin.apt @alinush]

@zooko This is insightful.
https://t.co/znUHV99t5i

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

@thisvishalsingh Occupational hazard for security researchers: https://t.co/D5woKhod2l

[alin.apt @alinush]

@zooko @harari_yuval @DanielStach Am I being too negative?

I am being too negative.

😔😔

🧘🧘

[alin.apt @alinush]

(Pardon my French.

Not meant as a rebuke of the OP; just of the take.)

[alin.apt @alinush]

@levduc i will pray for you 🙏

[alin.apt @alinush]

if you could not reason about security before llms, the prompting is not gonna save you.

[alin.apt @alinush]

I couldn't agree more.

I wrote a 6 min rant about it: https://t.co/LO257vkzjQ

tl;dr: We are still to graduate from "software carpentry" land into "software engineering" land, and formal methods are one of the missing pre-requisites.

[alin.apt @alinush]

Narratives matter, sure.

But doesn’t it also matter what they’re built on?

A small bar fight over not building privacy castles out of mud is worth it, IMO.

…given how many folks in the space are working their ass of to do better than: “entrust your privacy to my convenient assumption that none of my nodes will be compromised”

[alin.apt @alinush]

> show me what your privacy looks like...
> THIS IS WHAT FAKE PRIVACY LOOKS LIKE!

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

This is craazy. I asked one of our PhD engineers to look into NEAR *Confidential* Intents wondering how they designed their system. Unredacted, word-for-word, this was his answer 😱😱😱

"Everything I found out about the privacy claims and confidential intents is so bad that it seems almost comical and I cannot believe what I am seeing. Apparently they run a completely separate instance of the protocol, which is called FAR (as an opposite to NEAR), and that has a permissioned operator set. The entire confidentiality claim seems to rest upon the fact that it is a permissioned chain and the nodes are trusted to keep things private, there doesn't seem to be any deep technology behind it and it also does not seem to be open source. The entities running the nodes are also not publicly known.

I almost feel weird writing this because it is so absurdly bad that it feels like ... I don't know ... a simulation? I know the usual level of overpromising in Web3 but this is so many levels beyond believable that it still feels unreal."

[alin.apt @alinush]

@harari_yuval @DanielStach To be human is to have agency.

Just because you're not interested in any, doesn't mean the rest of us aren't.

[alin.apt @alinush]

@harari_yuval @DanielStach Such self-defeating non-sense.

Spare us your anti-human, borderline autistic future please.