Possible improvements to Glacier

Don’t store electronic copy of Cold Storage Information Page

Glacier recommends stores an electronic copy of the Cold Storage Information Page for easy copy-pasting for subsequent deposits or withdrawals. However, this is slightly less secure & complicated – and it’s still a good idea to check a physical copy of the Cold Storage Information Page to verify the electronic copy hasn’t been tampered with.

Printing QR codes on the Cold Storage Information Page would be another way to avoid the need to manually transcribe the deposits and withdrawals

No Address Reuse

Currently, Glacier reuses addresses for both depositing and withdrawing funds. As discussed in the protocol design document, this has both privacy and security implications.

This could be implemented with HD wallets, which would allow one to generate one master key and then use new derived addresses for each deposit or change transaction. Bitcoin Core does not yet support importing user-generated HD wallets in a straightforward way.

Avoiding address re-use would also prevent the use of a test withdrawal. Careful consideration would need to be given as to whether there is another way to safely test funds access, perhaps using something like the signrawtransaction Bitcoin Core RPC.

BIP39 Mnemonic Support

BIP39 supports the creation of private keys encoded as an English mnemonic for ease and reliability of transcription. It’s not yet supported by Glacier because it’s not supported by Bitcoin Core.

Sign Withdrawal Transactions With Individual Signatures

Bringing multiple private keys together in the same physical location for the Withdrawal Protocol entails risk (they could be physically stolen). It would be good to have an option to sign the withdrawal one transaction at a time, probably by bringing a QR-encoded physical hardcopy of the partially-signed transaction to the storage location of each private key.

Consider Shamir’s Secret Sharing or Vanilla Multisig vs. P2SH Transactions

Glacier currently uses P2SH transactions. This allows all signatories storing private keys to view the user’s balance, because a copy of the redeem script must be kept with each private key.

Vanilla multisig transactions would address this, but it’s not clear if it’s possible to do vanilla multisig configurations with over 3 keys. Another option is to use a single Bitcoin private key, split into n pieces using Shamir’s Secret Sharing, which would not have any limitations on the number of keyholders, but would require additional cryptographic software be integrated into Glacier.

Automate Quarantined USB creation

Many of the steps for creating the Quarantined USBs could be automated in a simple script.

Security With Biased Dice

Assess integration of this paper and/or this algorithm so that the quality of our randomness is not vulnerable to dice bias.

Entropy Quality Testing

Use an entropy test suite such as ent to verify the quality of generated entropy before it’s used.

Bitcoin Core Version

Pinning Currently, we download Bitcoin Core on to the Quarantined App USBs via the Ubuntu Package archive. However, because Bitcoin is a privately-managed archive, it only hosts the latest release, rather than all previous versions. This prevents us from pinning the protocol to use a specific release (desireable for ongoing compatibility).