Security framework and notions for Bitcoin contracting protocols

The problems of Bitcoin contracting protocols security promise interesting research tracks to develop new security notions and framework, similar to the reasoning tools leveraged by day-to-day cryptographers. Decades of theoritical and applied cryptography have proven that lack of careful cryptoanalaysis in ciphers conceptions and deployment introduce subtle security issues.

Resarch in Bitcoin contracting protocol security in the last years where flaws have been found to be common across protocols, sounds intuitevely to suggest that drawing out security frameworks would greatly improve such protocols robustness.

At least few security notions could be started to be sketched out :

contract integrity : an onchain execution of the contract should not be obstrucated by an attacker, at least without a measurable cost
fee-bumping integrity : an onchain execution of the contract should not be obstrucated by an attacker to force useless fee-bumping

I don't believe those notions are logically equivalent. For e.g a Coinjoin might be fee-bumped by a CPPF, this fee-bumping might be obstrucated by an attacker but utxo committed in the Coinjoin are safe in themselves.

One starting paper in this direction is @jachiang's https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.07528.pdf

I've also started recently L2-zoology : https://github.com/ariard/L2-zoology. I'm thinking more this new documentation as an experiments/observations/attacks howto scratchbook from which to collect theoretical, non-engineering problems that we can log back here :)

bitcoin-problems / bitcoin-problems.github.io

Security framework and notions for Bitcoin contracting protocols #12