QIP-15: Remote Staking Check

[JB395]

Abstract

Provide a Website to securely check the staking status of a wallet, extending the functionality of the current Global Full Nodes Incentive Program – check site.

Motivation

It is difficult to remotely monitor the staking status of a wallet currently. Users need to setup some kind of remote access, which comes with risks. This proposal would upgrade the wallet to accept a validated network request and respond with encrypted info about staking status.

Specification

The current Global Full Nodes Incentive Program website has functionality to validate a Qtum Core node running, given the port number and IP address.

https://fullnodes.qtum.org/check

This proposal would extend this idea to allow a secure remote check of the staking status of a wallet. This could improve wallet security because users would not have to setup any remote access (aside from VPN users) to verify their wallet staking status remotely.

• A Web page, like “checkmywallet.qtum.org” would accept the wallet IP address, the remote port mapping the first current peer connection, the first ever transaction ID for that node (as a password), and a captcha.
• The wallet would be updated to accept this message from the Website, rate limited to once per block, and return the getstakinginfo fields, and the first 10 fields of getwalletinfo, encrypted with the first transaction ID (or something else) as the key.
• The request and response should work through VPNs, TOR and un-forwarded port 3888 home networks.
• The Web page would display the wallet information.

[Earlz]

It would be a privacy violation and potential security risk for a node to plainly broadcast what wallet addresses it is in control of.

Despite that, it is possible to determine that an address is staking by simply seeing if the address has recently created a block by checking a block explorer. However, for most users (<10K Qtum) this would require a lot of time before a website like this can determine with confidence that the wallet is not staking... and there still is the chance of a false negative (ie, staking but website says it's not) by simply having an unlucky wallet that takes 3-4x the expected amount of time to make a block.

I like this idea, but not sure there is a proper way to do it