How To Avoid Future Krack-Like Failures: Create Well-Maintained 'Fat' Protocols Using Initial Coin Offerings

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the blockchain-cryptocurrency-fashionable-moi? dept

It came as something of a shock to learn recently that several hugely-popular security protocols for Wi-Fi, including WPA (Wireless Protected Access) and WPA2, were vulnerable to a key re-installation attack (pdf). A useful introduction from the EFF puts things in context, while more technical details can be found on the krackattacks.com site, and in a great post by Matthew Green. As well as the obvious security implications, there’s another angle to the Krack incident that Techdirt readers may find of note. It turns out that one important reason why what is a fairly simple flaw was not spotted earlier is that the main documentation was not easily accessible. As Wired explains:

The WPA2 protocol was developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which acts as a standards body for numerous technical industries, including wireless security. But unlike, say, Transport Layer Security [TLS], the popular cryptographic protocol used in web encryption, WPA2 doesn’t make its specifications widely available. IEEE wireless security standards carry a retail cost of hundreds of dollars to access, and costs to review multiple interoperable standards can quickly add up to thousands of dollars.

The obvious way to avoid this issue is to ensure that key protocols are all freely available so that they can be scrutinized by the greatest number of people. But the Wired article points out that there’s a different problem in that situation:

Even open standards like TLS experience major, damaging bugs at times. Open standards have broad community oversight, but don’t have the funding for deep, robust maintenance and vetting

It’s another well-known concern: just because protocols and software are open doesn’t necessarily mean that people will find even obvious bugs. That’s because they may not have the time to look for them, which in turn comes down to incentives and rewards. Peer esteem only goes to far, and even hackers have to eat. If they receive no direct reward for spending hours searching through code for bugs, they may not bother.

So if we want to avoid major failures like the Krack vulnerability, we need to do two things. First, key protocols and software should be open and freely available. That’s the easy part, since openness is now a well-accepted approach in the digital world. Secondly, we need to find a way to reward people for looking at all this stuff. As Krack shows, current incentives aren’t working. But there’s a new approach that some are touting as the way forward. It involves the fashionable idea of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) of cryptocurrency tokens. A detailed article on qz.com explains how ICOs can be used to fund new software projects by encouraging people to buy tokens speculatively:

The user would pay for a token upfront, providing funds for coders to develop the promised technology. If the technology works as advertised and gains popularity, it should attract more users, thus increasing demand for the token offered at the start. As the token value increases, those early users who bought tokens will benefit from appreciating token prices.

It’s that hope of future investment gains that would encourage people to buy ICO tokens from a risky venture. But it’s not just the early users who benefit from a technology that takes off. A key idea of this kind of ICO is that the coders behind the technology would own a sizable proportion of the total token offering; as the technology becomes popular, and tokens gain in value, so does their holding.

This novel approach could be applied to protocol development. The hope is that by creating “fat” protocols that can capture more of the value of the ecosystem that is built on top of them, there would be funds available to pay people to look for bugs in the system, which would be totally open. It’s an intriguing idea — one that may be worth trying given the problems with today’s approaches.

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Filed Under: cryptocurrency, funding, ico, krack, protocols, standards, wpa2