2018-6-12 00:05 |
This document describes a weakness in Bitcoin Design that reduces the security of SPV proofs and therefore SPV Wallets.
The Problem
Bitcoin Merkle tree makes no distinction between inner nodes and leaf nodes.
Crafting a Transaction-node in 2^72 operations
The following diagram shows a 64-byte Bitcoin transaction, and how this transaction is split into two 32-byte chunks.
First, there are no 64-byte Bitcoin transaction that pass standard-checks, so the presence of such transaction should rise an alarm.
A complete solution would require soft-forking Bitcoin to prevent blocks having a full tree, which is nasty.
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