polymutex
@polymutex
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Working on walletbeat, an L2Beat for wallets. Who watches the wallets? Mostly posting on Farcaster.
Joined January 2022
Working on walletbeat, an L2Beat for Ethereum wallets. Inspired by @VitalikButerin in one of his blog posts. Who watches the wallets?
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๐ข This shipweek on Walletbeat:.- Ambire wallet data update.- Iterate on Safe multisig account support in tracked wallet data.- Adding EIP-7702 delegation handling to wallet data.- Setting up Vitest tests to do some wallet data integrity checks that can't be done at build time.
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To another 10 years of Ethereum.
Start the 10 year celebration now. To memorialize Ethereumโs anniversary, the free, commemorative Ethereum Torch NFT is now available to mint. Minting will end on July 31st at 4PM UTC. Mint the commemorative NFT.
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Walletbeat hasn't given up ๐ซก
IMHO weโve lost this battle many years ago already when having to rely on external RPCs (rotating or not) become the norm instead of making it easy to run your own RPC. damn, even so called โeducatorsโ in this space donโt run their own nodes and the first thing they teach.
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Donated more today. Please do the same. Roman needs help.
In NYC subway after long hours of work. Sleep deprived as hell. Trials are brutal.
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@jimouris @CPerezz19 I think the "many requests from other users go through the same middleware" is an important part I missed. That does help add noise to the logs of the RPC providers. Maybe wallets and/or the middleware should also proactively generate their own noise!.
I'd argue that rotating RPCs in a TEE solves both problems. Problem 1 is solved since the RPC provider sees IPs from the TEE middleware. Problem 2 is solved since many requests (e.g., from other users) go through the same TEE middleware. Cont'd โคต๏ธ.
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@jimouris @CPerezz19 Response thread from @jimouris here!.Overall, I think we agree that:.- Rotating RPCs can be designed to be better for privacy than the status quo of raw unproxied RPCs.- Rotating RPCs aren't the endgame (PIR is).- There's more work to do here ๐ซก.
I mostly agree with @polymutex; tho my take is that `Rotating RPCs` is not the final solution, but definitely enhances privacy. Here are my point-to-point takes โคต๏ธ.
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So give @jimouris a follow ๐ซก.Also consider @CPerezz19 who did similar work (see below). But most importantly:.- Run your own node. - Ask your wallet developer to start caring about RPC-level privacy. Thanks for reading!.
What you're seeing here is Metamask re-routed via ToRPC proxy to send all RPC requests via TOR to a Geth node. Enabling full privacy of IP/User-data with Address/funds/txs. Specially from wallet providers!๐ต๏ธ๐ต๏ธ. This is a pet-project (ToRPC) I've had lately. Privacy is normal.๐ซก
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Even if this thread appears critical of @jimouris's work, I want to emphasize that it is not intended as a dunk. I highly respect anyone who actually steps up to tackle this problem. This is under-researched and needs more attention, so it's heartening to see folks working on it.
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Things I didn't cover but also matter:.- RPC timing correlation attacks. - Wallets looking up multiple addresses' balance in a single RPC. - Non-Ethereum requests that leak similar data. Today's wallets are full of those; ask me how I know. - L2s with centralized endpoints. (lol).
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It is also better to have more providers than you have addresses. This way, each provider learns either one of your addresses, or none; never multiple. But the real fix?.- Run your own node!.- Ask your wallet developer to start caring about RPC-level privacy.
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Better solution: for an RPC about `address`, always send it to provider #`hash(address) modulo num_providers`. In other words, queries about the same address go to the same RPC provider. This ensures no provider learns your full set of addresses.
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Mixnets alone also don't solve problem 2. The problem remains that rotating RPCs naively (random provider on each request) is actually ๐ฌ๐ค๐ง๐จ๐ for privacy: it means multiple providers get a view of multiple of your addresses over time.
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Why aren't mixnets used today?.- Users don't ask for RPC-level privacy out of their wallet developers. Walletbeat fixes this. - <100ms RPCs UX expectations. Mixnets/middleware add latency. - Integration in browser wallets requires reimplementing TLS in JS to encrypt the last hop.
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A proxy should be blind to what it passes through. Cryptography solves this without the need for TEE trust assumptions. Mixnets such as Tor/Nym/HOPR work this way: Encrypt the payload in multiple layers of encryption, where each hop peels one layer of encryption off the onion.
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The client can verify this by performing a workload attestation dance. It is possible, but complicated to implement. I have not seen a real implementation of this in practice, and it's not clear to me if that would be easier to implement than just integrating an actual mixnet.
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TEEs are not bulletproof. But even if we assume they work as intended, the client still needs to verify that the middleware they are talking to is actually running in a TEE at all. Otherwise, the client (wallet) can't be sure the middleware isn't actually logging everything.
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The second solution solves problem 1 by introducing a middleware in a TEE. It is essentially a blind proxy, for which blindness is provided by the TEE. But problem 2 remains unsolved: Providers can still associate your Ethereum addresses with one another.
Simple idea: a server between the wallet and the RPC providers. The server randomly uses a different RPC for each request. Run this in a TEE ๐! The cloud doesn't see your requests (careful, they still metadata!) - and the RPC doesn't see your IP (they see the cloud's)
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The first solution proposed solves neither problem. In fact, it makes problem 1 ๐ฌ๐ค๐ง๐จ๐: instead of one provider that knows your IP and Ethereum addresses, now ๐ข๐ช๐ก๐ฉ๐๐ฅ๐ก๐ such providers know them both.
I see two ways of implementing rotating RPCs:.โก๏ธ 1. Implement this functionality in wallets directly. Advantages ๐.โข Fast. โข Disadvantages ๐.โข This can't be adapted to any wallet as it'd need to be implemented every time. โข **More importantly** RPCs still see the IP of the.
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๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฏ๐น๐ฒ๐บ ๐ญ: No provider should be able to associate your Ethereum address with your IP address. ๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฏ๐น๐ฒ๐บ ๐ฎ: No provider should be able to associate two of your Ethereum addresses with one another. Particularly important in the context of stealth addresses.
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