Categories
Crypto Free Software

Trusted Third Party Hardware

From the point of view of the Bitcoin white paper, trusted platform modules, programmable secure elements, and secure enclaves are all examples of the presence of trusted third parties. They are “Treacherous Computing” hardware that someone other than you ultimately controls, and who you must trust to act in your best interests.

If it was the case that the use of hardware that obeys trusted thirds parties in order to improve the security or speed of cryptocurrencies offered obvious benefits that cannot be achieved in any other way then objecting to this on ideological grounds might seem like an example of Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. But trusted third party hardware is not necessarily always more secure and trustworthy than hardware or software that the user controls.

Promoting trusted third party hardware solutions in cryptocurrency without acknowledging this should therefore be questioned both ideologically and pragmatically.

Ideologically because the CEO of a hardware wallet company should not have more control of the systems that you use to hold your cryptocurrency than you do, and they should not be beholden to their chip vendor for that power either.

Pragmatically because adding more places for malware to infect and hide in, and in ways that may be impossible to detect and remove, does not make things more secure.

Given all this it is important to look beyond the marketing of trusted third party hardware. Here are some articles describing issues with such systems.

Secure Elements

Government agencies do pressure chip producers to include backdoors to their products, so why should one suppose it would be different with SE, especially knowing that these are being used for financial transactions? The user would never learn about this, because of the nature of the SE.

Is “Banking-grade Security” Good Enough for Your Bitcoins?

A team of security engineers from Rapid7 at Black Hat USA 2016 conference in Las Vegas demonstrated how a small and simple modifications to equipment would be enough for attackers to bypass the Chip-and-PIN protections and enable unauthorized transactions.

This ATM Hack Allows Crooks to Steal Money From Chip-and-Pin Cards

The Infineon Bug

A crippling flaw in a widely used code library has fatally undermined the security of millions of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes settings, including national identity cards, software- and application-signing, and trusted platform modules protecting government and corporate computers.

Millions of high-security crypto keys crippled by newly discovered flaw

A vulnerability was identified in the RSA key generation method used by Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) manufactured by Infineon and contained in some Lenovo products. RSA public keys generated by the Infineon TPM for use by certain software programs should be considered insecure.

RSA Keys Generated by Infineon TPMs are Insecure

Of course, if Infineon made this mistake, who else could have made a similar faux pas?

ROCA encryption #fail: Worse than we thought (and way worse than KRACK)

Secure Enclaves

Researchers have demonstrated using Intel’s Software Guard Extensions to hide malware and steal cryptographic keys from inside SGX’s protected enclave

Using Intel’s SGX to Attack Itself

It’s still too early to know what the full fallout from the SEP’s decryption will be, but it could open the door for password harvesting, spoofing, and other security-compromising attacks.

iOS users beware: A hacker has just published a decryption key for the Apple Secure Enclave, which is responsible for processing Touch ID transactions.

Categories
Art Books Crypto Culture

Artists Re:Thinking The Blockchain

“Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain” Edited by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garret, Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner, 2017, ISBN 9780993248757.

Furtherfield and Torque have compiled an excellent range of writing and imagery about blockchain network technology’s role in the arts and vice versa. You can buy it here:

https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/100826

If you are in North America, Amazon UK will be cheaper for postage until the North American edition is out in February 2018 here:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artists-rethinking-the-blockchain-9780993248740

I have two pieces in the book.

“Bad Shibe” is the story of a young person in a post-fiat-currency utopia suffering from their first pangs of doubt that they, and more generally the society that they live in, may not be as wonderful as they previously thought. It is accompanied by Lina Theodorou’s wonderful illustrations of a story that the narrator makes very difficult to illustrate.

“Blockchain Poetics” is an essay about what proponents and critics of cryptocurrency think it is about, the historical context of these views, and how they are expressed culturally and rhetorically. It discusses trust, hodling, anti-politics, the nature of truth, and the “doge” subculture that is a major feature of “Bad Shibe.

The book is a wonderful physical artefact and the writing presents a wide range of voices, see the LUP page for details.

Categories
Art Crypto Ethereum Projects

Art Is 2.0


“Art Is”, 2014/2017, DApp.

People have argued about the definition of art for millennia.

We finally have the techonomic means to settle this argument.

In “Art Is”, people can use the Ethereum network to pay to define art at a price equal to the strength of their certainty in the correctness of their definition. The results are an economically rational definition of art, far stronger than discourse paid for by third party cultural institutions.

The original “Art Is” from 2014 suffered from bitrot so I re-implemented it.

As ever, you can access it via an Ethereum-enabled browser here and the source code is available in a git repository here.

Categories
Art Crypto Ethereum Projects

About “Is Art”

This is the text for the current showing of “Is Art”.

“Is Art”, 2016/2017, Ethereum DApp, Rob Myers.

Late 1960s Conceptual Art and mid 1990s net.art are useful inspiration for thinking about the blockchain and smart contracts. These art movements stood in critical tension with the systems of communication, law and commerce of their eras. Each treated rootless information, whether about sense data or network messages, as the critical subject of art and a new potential artworld. Their promise and their eventual recuperation by the existing artworld chimes with the historical experience of the blockchain.

“Is Art” takes the Conceptual Art ideas of dematerialisation (art that is not presented in a fixed physical form) and nomination (something that is art because someone or something says it is) and combines them with the net.art idea of the interactive artwork that exists in or interferes with network protocols.

In it, an Ethereum smart contract contains the assertion that it either “is” or “is not” art. A web page connected to the Ethereum network displays the state of this assertion to anyone who can access the contract and allows them switch it between states. When they do so this will become a fact secured in Ethereum’s blockchain with the strength of millions of dollars of computing power a day.

Is this sufficient to determine whether the contract is or is not art? Where and how is the claim really being made and determined? How does this relate to historical examples of such artworks? And how does it relate to other claims of fact stored in other smart contracts?

To Change The Status Of The Contract

1. Click anywhere on the screen.
2. In the dialog that opens, click “Update”.
3. And in the dialog that opens in response to *that*, click on “Accept”.
4. Watch for the update on both screens.

Categories
Art Crypto Ethereum Projects Shows

“Bad Shibe” at New World Order

Lina Theodorou’s installation at Furtherfield’s “New World Order” featuring their wonderful illustrations for my story “Bad Shibe”.

You can buy the print version of Bad Shibe, featuring those illustrations, at the show or online via PayPal or with Bitcoin.

Via Furtherfield – https://twitter.com/furtherfield/status/865569017515438084

Categories
Art Crypto Ethereum Projects Shows

“Is Art” at Ethereal

Is Art” in the FOAM space at Ethereal summit in New York. You can manipulate it using the MacBook and watch its state update via the blockchain on the tablet next to it.

From show curator the awesome Sam Hart (thanks Sam!) – https://twitter.com/hxrts/status/866447265229156353

Categories
Art Crypto Projects Shows

New World Order

My novella “Bad Shibe” and Lina Theodorou’s amaze illustrations for it are in Furtherfield Gallery’s show “New World Order” from Saturday 20 May – Sunday 25 June 2017.

Click here for more details, including the press release and catalogue for the show.

As well as Bad Shibe, I have an essay in the book “Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain” being published during the show and blink and you’ll miss me talking about smart contracts in the blockchain documentary “Change Everything Forever.”

From the press release:

A mysterious and controversial technology is among us. The Blockchain underpins digital currencies and makes possible dramatic new conceptions of global governance and economy, that could permanently enrich or demote the role of humans – depending on who you talk to.

A self-owning forest with ideas of expansion, a self-replicating android flower, a tale of lost innocence, a DIY money making rig, a Hippocratic Oath for software developers, a five minute marriage contract; this exhibition presented by Furtherfield shows us life with blockchain technologies – through artworks by Jaya Klara Brekke, Pete Gomes, Rob Myers, Primavera De Filippi of O’Khaos, Terra0, Lina Theodorou and xfx (aka Ami Clarke).

Imagine a world in which responsibility for many aspects of life (reproduction, decision-making, organisation, nurture, stewardship) are mechanised and automated. Transferred, once and for all, from natural and social systems into a secure, networked, digital ledger of transactions and computer-executed contracts.

The artworks in this exhibition envision future world-making by machines, markets and natural processes, free from interference by states and other human institutions.

Categories
Crypto Culture Projects

Bad Shibe – Out Now!

Cover Illustration for “Bad Shibe” by Lina Theodorou.

Bad Shibe, Novella, 2017.

“Bad Shibe” is the story of a young member of a near-future cryptocurrency-based utopia. YS works in an orchard in the day, goes to school in the evening, and tips everyone like a good shibe. Until one day they start feeling jealous of a newcomer and start digging in to how their world really works…

My page about the project, with some reading notes, is here: http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/bad-shibe/

It’s published by Furtherfield and their page about the project, where you can order a print copy or download the electronic version for free, is here: http://www.furtherfield.org/projects/bad-shibe-sci-fi-novella-rob-myers

Massive thanks to Lina Theodorou for their wonderful illustrations, and to Ruth Catlow for their excellent afterword (and tireless advocacy for the project). You are amaze.

Categories
Crypto Philosophy Uncategorized

Bitstrings

A “bit” is a basic unit of information entropy. It’s binary, either on or off, present or absent, one or zero.

A “string” in computer programming is a sequence of items of a particular length. They may be fixed or variable length. Eight, sixteen, thirty-two and sixty-four bit numbers are fixed length. A text string is variable length.

A byte is a series of eight bits that’s used as a standard representation for typographic characters, colour values and many other things. Up until IBM’s OS/360 project in the late 1960s there was no real standard for this – computers might be decimal, or alphabetic, or have “words” of sizes from four to twenty-four bits. Some Soviet computers of the same period used ternary logic rather than binary. Alan Turing used a logarithmic measure of information entropy called a “ban“. So be wary of naturalising the bit and the eight-bit byte, but when you see bits grouped together in strings of lengths that divide neatly into eight, recognise that this is related to the reality of how most modern computer sytems divide up their memory.)

Bitstrings can be used to represent the presence or absence of properties. A fixed-length bitstring is a bitfield, but we’re going to stick with the more general name. Integer numbers represented in binary use bits to represent the presence or absence of quantities of increasing sizes within the number. 0110 is six in a four bit “nibble”. UNIX filesystems represent the permissions that the owner and other users of a file have to access and manipulate it as a sequence of bits.

Such bitfields can be found throughout computing. The satirical proposal for an “evil bit” to be set on Internet messages that have evil intent, shows both the prevalence of bitstrings and their users awareness of the limitations of binary thinking and computational representation.

As with their use to represent integer numbers using binary, bits can represent doubling or halving of quantities. It takes 33 bits of entropy to uniquely identify an individual among seven billion on Earth. Cryptographic hashes, which produce compact unique “names” for any input file of any length, often output 128, 160 or 256 bit values. Each bit doubles the possible size, quantity, or uniqueness of the thing it represents. It also doubles the size of the space in which it can hide.

Contemporary cryptographic encoding and signing systems use keys several thousand bits in length. They would take a conventional computer an infeasable amount of time to break. This property is used in Bitcoin mining to create cryptographic puzzles that require capital outlay to solve.

A proposal for “vectored signatures” for the “V” version control system uses features of these different strings of bits. It represents assertions about an individual’s relationship to and opinion of a piece of code using a bitstring. It asserts the identity of that individual using cryptographic signatures. This combination is a generalization of cryptographic “keysigning” as recognition of identity, and the fact that Bitcoin transactions involve cryptographic signatures of communications between individuals about single-dimensional (monetary) quantities.

The bitstring representation of logical operators developed by the Logical Geometry project provides a compact and information-rich notation for various logics. Each bit represents a fact about an operator such as “true in all possible worlds”, and relates to geometric and trellis representations of the same operators. Bitwise operations on these representations are meaningful – for example bitwise NOT on p (1100) gives ¬p (0011).

The combination of logically manipulable bitstring representations (as with Logical Geometry) asserted through cryptographic signatures (as with vectored signatures) seems like a possibly fruitful area of investigation.

Categories
Art Crypto Generative Art Projects

Geneses

Geneses

A poem consisting of the genesis block hashes from the hundred cryptocurrencies with the highest market capitalization on January the Second, 2016 encoded as BIP-0039 mnemonics.

It begins:

abandon abandon abandon ability output crowd ice area thumb clown sibling charge youth range ribbon stairs plug argue provide toddler gaze edit meadow update

Details on how to order the book can be found here:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/geneses/