26
votes
How to generate a seed safely?
What is my seed?
Think about your seed as the combined username and password that grants access to your bank account. If anyone obtains your seed, they can login and access your funds.
Seed: You ...
- 3,135
18
votes
Accepted
Can a node steal my seed?
No, a node cannot steal your seed
When you send a transaction to the node you are connected to, you don't send the seed to it. The tx (=transaction) gets created locally on your PC/Smartphone/other ...
- 4,444
17
votes
What information is leaked if I reuse an address?
Fragments of the private key of that reused address are leaked. An attacker could find a bundle hash (via brute-forcing) that can be signed with the leaked fragments. Luckily for the user, the window ...
- 1,540
16
votes
Accepted
How does IOTA make itself resistant to quantum computing based attacks?
IOTA does not use traditional asymmetrical (public-key) cryptography algorithms which depend on not being able to efficiently computing discrete logarithms or factoring numbers (which are believed to ...
mihi♦
- 7,309
15
votes
Accepted
What information is leaked if I reuse an address?
To expand on CFB's answer, because IOTA uses Lamport signatures, half of the private key is leaked each time. This halves the security level of the address (from 54 trytes of security to 27 trytes for ...
- 1,358
13
votes
Accepted
How can I safely store my IOTA seed?
For digital storage, I would recommend using an offline password manager such as Keepass which can encrypt your key behind a password.
For paper storage, it may be good to print out a copy of your ...
- 3,135
12
votes
Accepted
Why aren't seeds longer than 81 trytes more secure?
IOTA uses 81-tryte (243-trit) addresses. We assume that 81-tryte seeds (shorter seeds can be considered as 81-tryte seeds after being padded with "9") map to 81-tryte addresses uniformly and hence ...
- 1,540
12
votes
Sending seeds to someone securely
Never send your seed over the network, just explain to your friend how to generate it's own seed securely offline. Ask him one address and transfer the iotas.
Securing transfer is one of the main ...
- 5,344
12
votes
Accepted
Address re-use and snapshot
You should never send iota to an address that was already spent. This will make it possible for an attacker to steal your iotas. This rule is uninfluenced by any snapshot.
The problem after a ...
- 791
10
votes
Accepted
Can someone explain very simplified how the Winternitz OTS/Lamport OTS works?
Simplified, Lamport One-Time-Signatures (OTS) work as follows. For illustration purposes I am using Bits and not Trits.
Assume you have a private key PRIV that consists of 100 (random) pairs of ...
- 1,663
10
votes
Accepted
How are addresses calculated from the seed?
First, a subseed is derived from the seed
Treat the seed as a (little-endian) number and add the index to it (a seed starting FEDCBA... and an index of 1 therefore results in GEDCBA....
Hash the ...
mihi♦
- 7,309
9
votes
What's with all the pending/unconfirmed transactions with the "STOLEN"?
Anyone can issue a transaction for any amount from any address. Such a transaction won't be confirmed without knowledge of the private key. Your case is about an attempt to pretend that funds have ...
- 1,540
9
votes
Accepted
How does Curl-P's copy protection feature work?
In their official statement, the IOTA team stated:
"With Coordinator IOTA's security depends on one-wayness of
Curl-P, without Coordinator the security depends on collision
resistance."
...
- 439
9
votes
Accepted
Why is the normalized hash considered insecure when containing the char 'M'
There was a bug in the wallet software related to absence of https://github.com/Come-from-Beyond/ISS/commit/de1a279450558848a81858fd57b023719eb9a0d3. "M" should be avoided to prevent leakage of the ...
- 1,540
8
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between "double-spending" and "address-reuse"?
Every double-spending is an address reuse but not every address-reuse is a double-spending.
Let's say you have an address with a balance of 100i
Double Spend
You send 100i from the address to ...
- 4,444
8
votes
Accepted
Do I Have to Change My Seed after Multiple Transactions?
It's safe to keep your seed. Even if you double-spend or reuse your address, your seed doesn't get exposed, only the private key of one address of your seed is partially revealed. You can generate an ...
- 4,444
7
votes
How can I safely store my IOTA seed?
What works best for me is storing the seed encrypted in a KeePass database file (or the offline password manager of your choice) on my computer and on an USB-Stick in another place (backup in case of ...
- 4,444
7
votes
Accepted
Does every pending transaction pose a threat for my remaining funds in the wallet?
While one single transaction is pending, there is no threat to your balance (apart from the obvious, that if the transaction confirms later, your balance will decrease by the transaction amount).
...
mihi♦
- 7,309
7
votes
Accepted
What prevents a malicious node from receiving a transaction and, instead of relaying it, attempting to compromise the now-weakened address?
After one signing of a transaction, you reveal 50% of your key, but it's still astronomically impossible to crack. You need 2^256 tries on average after 1 signing, which is the same amount as SHA-256 ...
- 3,135
7
votes
Accepted
How can IOTA's proof of work provide sufficient network security?
What PoW means in practice is that cost spent on mining = security. Ie. $100 fees per hour? Spend >$100 (in energy used for mining) to rewind these transactions. It's better with asics as that adds '...
- 1,607
7
votes
Can I be forced to reuse an address by confirming a transaction that is part of a double-spend attempt?
According to this answer to another question, I can just reattach my transaction again without signing it, so the answer is no. I cannot be forced to reuse my address for spending this way.
- 1,087
7
votes
Accepted
Does reattaching a transaction compromise my private key for the source address?
No.
The data signed in a transaction don't include parent and branch transaction hash.
So when you reattach a transaction the signature is unchanged. It means that the portion of the private key ...
- 5,344
7
votes
Accepted
Can one send a zero value transaction from any address to any address?
Technically speaking, a zero value transaction (bundle) neither needs to have nor can have a sender address. (Sending transactions in a bundle have value < 0 and receiving transactions have value ≥ ...
mihi♦
- 7,309
6
votes
How to generate a seed safely?
IOTA's development team has explicitly recommended only two seed generation methods. They are:
/dev/urandom (available on Linux/MaxOS)
Keepass' password generator
The first option may be too ...
- 374
6
votes
How many full IOTA nodes are there, and how many do there need to be?
Nobody can count the amount of full nodes
(Because of that, there are also no sites that track them)
Why?
Every square is a full node. Connected nodes are neighbours.
F has 3 Neighbours: E, H and ...
- 4,444
6
votes
Accepted
DB snapshots for the masses - are there any risks?
Cannot think of any problems. Obviously the database dump should be created while your node is down, and the new node should be down too, while you are copying the database.
The database might ...
mihi♦
- 7,309
6
votes
Accepted
What's with all the pending/unconfirmed transactions with the "STOLEN"?
As others already stated, these transactions are not valid as they do not have the correct signature (some of them even have some text - stating that they don't have the correct signature - tryte-...
mihi♦
- 7,309
6
votes
Accepted
Secure Way to Copy & Paste Seed into Desktop Wallet
Depending on how thorough the malware is, following could work:
don't save the last/first/middle part of your seed in your pw (=password) manager, memorize it and just manually put it in
save the ...
- 4,444
6
votes
How can IOTA's proof of work provide sufficient network security?
"Hype aside it's a minor change that's equivalent to transaction chains in Lightning Network or Raiden, offering exactly the same advantages (asynchronous) and disadvantages (lower security)." - this ...
- 1,540
6
votes
Why are there no safeguards in place to prevent sending a transaction to a used-up address?
The "problem" is, anyone is free to send funds to any address they want, even if this address has been emptied before (the protocol is agnostic to the source & destination address).
A partial ...
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