Feed for tag: soft-fork
Braiins OS: Open Source Alternative to Bitcoin Mining Firmware
The company behind SlushPool announced the first release of its Open Source ASIC miner firmware called Braiin OS. Braiins OS is the very first fully open-source, Linux based system for cryptocurrency embedded devices. Now enabling AsicBoost. Finally, you know exactly what’s running on your device, have the ability to customize it in any way and benefit from major functionality tweaks enabled by a continuous development and updates. Highlight of the features:
A Change to the MERKLEBLOCK command to protect from Leaf-Node weakness

We covered recently the Leaf-Node weakness and the different proposals that were discussed to address it.

Sergio Demian Lerner, from the RSK team and one of the participants in the discussion, went on presenting his idea for a new fix on his blog.

Recently a fix to the Bitcoin Merkle tree design weakness in the RSK’s bridge was built by making invalid SPV proofs whose internal hashes are valid Bitcoin transaction. While this solves the problem, it is by no means a “clean” solution: it creates false-negative cases (with very low probability) and it reduces verification efficiency.

CVE-2017-12842: Trusted Merkle Tree Depth for Safe Tx Inclusion Proofs Without a Soft Fork
Recently a weakness in the merkle tree algorithm of Bitcoin, called Leaf-Node weakness was discussed during a responsible discolsure. It’s been known for a while that the Merkle tree algorithm fails to distinguish between inner nodes and a 64 byte transaction, as inner nodes of the merkle tree are constructed by concatenation of two 32 byte SHA256'd hashes.