Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Announcing HDMNode: a Node.JS based HDM Bitcoin wallet

I just released an open source a library called HDMNode. It’s a Node.JS based API server and client for hosted HDM (Hierarchical-Deterministic Multisig) Bitcoin wallets. If you’re interested in using it or contributing to it, please read on!

The goal of HDMNode is to make it easier for developers to build HDM wallets. Such wallets have significant security and privacy advantages over most popular wallet types and Bitcoin users (and the ecosystem) would benefit from a greater availability of high quality HDM wallet products. I believe there’s a dearth of HDM wallets because they’re fairly complicated to build. I hope that HDMNode will reduce the effort as well as provide developers a well audited and secure codebase on which they could safely rely. It would be a shame if every developer who wanted to build such a wallet had to face the same design issues and security pitfalls.

Why did I make HDMNode and why am I releasing it now? When I started working on this project I intended to build a complete HDM wallet product. However, as time went by I realized I had bit off a bit more than I could chew in the timeframe I had allotted to the project. While I made a lot of progress on the backend and the API client there was still a good amount of work to be done to make it production ready. In addition, the code needed many more eyeballs on it before I could be confident in its security. I didn’t want to risk shipping a product that holds people’s money with glaring flaws that I failed to catch. So, I decided that the best course of action was to open source the code and give other developers an opportunity to inspect the code, to use it in their own products, and to hopefully contribute back to the project.

While I expect HDMNode to be mostly used by hosted wallet providers, if HDMNode evolves into a complete open source wallet (with UI) it could give users who want to protect their privacy the option to host their wallet on their own servers. I don’t expect this to be the primary use case but I also don’t think that users must be forced to choose between security and privacy. With HDMNode, they could have both.

If HDMNode gains traction, I hope that its JSON-RPC based API will be standardized, allowing users to mix and match clients and servers that they trust and want to use.

What’s makes HDM wallets so great, anyway? HDM wallets’ strong security comes from their reliance on P2SH multisig addresses (as defined in BIP11 and BIP16). Such wallets store coins in addresses that are guarded by multiple private keys, each of which is generated on different machine. The typical setup is 2-of-3, where the client, the server, and a backup machine each have a key, and at least 2 keys are required to sign off on every transaction. This is far more robust than non multisig wallets, where the machine that holds the key that protects the coins becomes a single point of failure from a security perspective: if that machine gets compromised, the coins are gone.

HDM wallets also offer much better privacy than no-HD multisig wallets. Such wallets rely on a fixed set or subset of keys to generate P2SH addresses. Anyone observing the blockchain could link those addresses to each other (at least after their coins are spent) and can therefore derive the user’s balance and transaction history. HDM wallets don’t have this weakness because they can generate an arbitrary number of addresses, each made from a unique set of keys, from a single randomly generated seed, as defined in BIP32. Without knowing the wallet’s seed, it’s impossible to associate those addresses with each other.

HDM wallets have a couple of additional benefits shared with their non-multisig HD counterparts. They make it easy for users to back up their wallet once by backing up the wallet’s seed and restore it fully at a later point regardless of the number of transactions the user has performed. This is possible because having the wallet’s seed allows you to scan the blockchain and find all the transactions that sent or received coins from or to addresses that can be derived from that seed. HDM wallets also allow users to set up a hierarchical tree of sub-wallets, where having the parent wallet’s keys allows you to derive the child wallet’s keys but not vice versa. This feature can be useful for organizations or groups who want to give some members limited ability to spend the organization’s coins or observe incoming transactions to other branches of the tree.

HDM wallets have real benefits, but, as you might have guessed, they’re not perfect. Besides their implementation complexity, the main downside of HDM wallets is the initial added friction when creating the wallet, at least compared to pure hosted wallets. Users have to pick a strong password and remember it (no password recovery!). If they forget their password or fail to properly back up their keys, they can lose their coins. Also, to get the full security benefits of HDM wallets users should also set up the backup key pair on a separate machine (ideally an offline one). If a user doesn’t do that, and her machine is compromised at wallet creation time, a hacker could steal her coins once they’re deposited into the wallet. Despite this weakness (which users can avoid without too much effort) HDM wallets still much secure than client side wallets that expose the keys that guard the coins every time the user transacts. Such wallets expose the keys every time the user sends money, making their vulnerability window much bigger.

HDMNode is currently designed for supporting 2-of-3 multisig wallets, with one key on the server, one key on the client, and one key in backup (ideally offline), which I expect to be the most popular option for HDM wallets. This setup combines the best security features of wallets that store private keys client side and hosted wallets that store private keys on the server. In HDMNode, the coins are safe whether the client or the server gets hacked (but not both). If the server disappears or becomes inaccessible, the user can recover her coins using the backup (offline) key. An attacker must compromise at least 2 of these different systems to steal the user’s coins. While the server can’t steal the coins, it can act as a security service for the client by enforcing 2 factor auth and by refusing to sign off on transactions that seem suspicious or that are against user-defined rules such as daily spend limits. This protects the user against attacks where the attacker gains control over the user’s device and tries to steal the user’s coins by sending spend requests to the server.


If you’re sold on HDM wallets and you want to build one, I hope you use HDMNode. I’ll be happy to take contributions from anyone who wants to make Bitcoin wallets more secure and trusted!

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