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Bitcoin Blockchain Contains Child Pornography
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in General
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/bitcoin-blockchain-contains-child-porn/
https://www.pcmag.com/news/359936/bitcoins-blockchain-caught-loaded-with-child-pornography
And of course, the images can never ben removed owing to the way blockchains work, so...
I'm wondering why people have not begun stuffing the chain with copyrighted media, etc. Permanent unlimited storage!
Thanked by 1Aidan
Comments
I don't get it. What's so addicting about child porn?
Something of this nature was bound to happen. not good.
A bit inefficient! Edit: actually maybe not, but still dumb..
Containing links to X does not equal containing X.
It's not permanent unlimited storage. If enough people actually did this, it would bring the entire system down.
I am honestly surprised something like bitcoin didn't forsee this problem and restrict garbage data from being injected into the blockchain. I predict future blockchain designs will be required to have some form of data validation builtin to prevent random data from being injected by anybody and passed around to all participating nodes.
Truth be told, this is a major blockchain exploit. And thanks to this media attention, one more people will start using.
so they finally found something that will provide reason to governments making laws against blockchains. simply forbid bitcoin because it already contains illegal things and can't be fixed. also sue or arrest all people help spreading whatever illegal stuff through it even further... yeah reasonable.
Read further...it actually contains X, not just links.
Exactly my reaction.
Now where does that leave someone (legally) if they run a full node? Oof.
Private permissioned blockchain
I wouldn't call 122GB "relatively huge" at all. I suspect if someone was to inject a few hundred more GB of data into the bitcoin blockchain, most nodes would require upgrading. A few terabytes would be enough to cripple the system.
And since there is apparently nothing on the network to stop that from happening, that is a serious problem.
Repeat a few times and eventually the blockchain will get so large people would be forced to abandon bitcoin altogether and start the blockchain over again fresh, without this exploit in there to avoid history repeating itself.
Even aside from that, I can easily imagine the following exploit:
1) Build a few very high storage capacity bitcoin nodes, enough to commit transactions to the network permanently.
2) Fill up the blockchain with a ton of garbage data.
3) Watch all the other nodes go down as they fill up their storage and are unable to accept anymore new blocks from the network.
1 person doing this would cripple bitcoin's blockchain.
1) Build a few very high storage capacity bitcoin nodes, enough to commit transactions to the network permanently.
That's going to be... Really expensive.
Yeah theres images too in encoded form. not just links.
Here is one viewer/sender
https://cryptograffiti.info/
Imagine if you post your ex's nudes there? lol
Well from the murmurings on this thread, I expect all cryptocurrency values to take a big knock. If there's anything to enrage the general public it'd be child pornography.
More likely to see all coin values taking a hit than alt coins being taken up. From what (limited) observations I've had on prices, the 'rest' tend to follow the market cap of BTC and are pegged somewhat accordingly.
Bitcoin was still in beta when its zealot fans push it to become global digital currency.
It is no wonder if it has lots of issues.
The technology is not yet mature enough
I guess someone will be selling a bitcoin filtering app soon - whether it works or not.
You mean...I'm the only one that does this??
It wouldn't. The stuff that is already in the blockchain can never be removed, and the only way to stop new garbage entering would be an update that all bitcoin nodes have to apply.
The only good news (if you can consider it good) is if you use an online wallet you don't have to download the blockchain, and thus don't need to download the kiddie porn in there. So, that is one solution.
Obviously. In case it wasn't obvious, this kind of attack would basically allow somebody to temporarily disable all bitcoin blockchain updates, as the only nodes still working and not overloaded would belong to the attacker. It basically would put the entire bitcoin blockchain under the control of a single person temporarily. And yes, it would cost a small fortune to pull off.
I have no idea if that could be combined with other attacks to make that valuable, or not.
If somebody actually did that, the community would probably be forced to fork the blockchain at a state before that attack occurred.
Something like the bitcoin blockchain isn't merely an open text area where you can put in whatever you want. Transaction numbers, wallet addresses, and coin amounts are predefined data structures that can easily be validated for correctness before being accepted by a node and propagated around the network.
For example, a bitcoin amount is known to be a base 10 decimal number with 8 digits of precision. It is easy to validate that to prevent somebody from sending a bitcoin transaction with a quantity of 0.0ASCBDEFYGSJKGYGH since that isn't a valid amount of bitcoin.
The exploit here seems to be a direct result of a total lack of validation on bitcoin wallet addresses.
The fact that the developers apparently decided such validation wasn't necessary is shocking, and while it is impossible to do anything about the blocks that already exist, I would hope the bitcoin community will update their node source code to do this validation and reject new blocks like that in future.
"What an incredibility stupid use of the blockchain. This is why transactions should be expensive. Because now this data will be stored for the rest of time at the expense of nodes all over the world. For what... about $1 fucking dumb."
https://cryptograffiti.info/#0ba093d32d52b2b9c1aac284ecd58a9b1ded993197a93179398e4344d637848e
Of course it wouldn't. That's the joke.
They would sell an app that doesn't.
The biggest joke is that there's such a concept as "illegal data" in the first place.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
The very existence of this thread and the fact that people care about this as a concern disagrees with your sentiment.
As has been demonstrated, attaching additional arbitrary data to a transaction is a problematic thing to enable people to do.
If cryptocurrency has any hope of going mainstream, problems like this will need to be fixed.
I think this is fixable by miner consensus, the way some other blockchain repairs were done in past years. Basically they all sign a message saying "Bytes X to X+N of the blockchain have bad stuff in them. If you run the SHA256 algorithm up to byte X, the internal state is ABC, and if you run it up to X+N then the internal state is DEF". People could verify this, then zero out the N problematic bytes in their local copy, and use a code patch to plug in ABC and DEF while checking blockchain hashes. There might have to be a few more such numbers because of hashed records but it doesn't sound that bad.
Cannot agree more with what you have written. Thank you for having what should be common sense.
Well, as long as nobody knows how to decode your data there won't be any problems that's for sure but while i agree with those articles being largely clickbait i wouldn't underestimate the threat. All those uuencode/yenc coded messages on usenet are not treated as random garbage after all but as the pirate uploads they usually are and taking on a format that tried to mimmick innocent postings wouldn't change that as long it's known how to decode them.
Ah steganography...
Just think, if we pooled all our hard drives together, and put the 1s and 0s in a different order, we could mimic the human brain.
Information theory aside, I think the issue is more about ability, intent and public image, rather than debating whether data can be sent back and forth.
Well, yeah but from the paper it seems that up 90KB can be stored in a single place. To me that seems more like encoding than picking more or less random parts out of 122GB of available data and mixing them together to get a certain outcome.
It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. If I were a BTC afficionado I'd wonder who put it there and whether authorities would be OK with that kind of content being hosted on nodes.
Don't think the format/locality matters all that much TBF, the information is present regardless of any obfuscation or system design.
Pi contains all the child pornography every created and all the child pornography that will ever be created, not to mention every movie ever made, every episode of Scooby Doo, complete instructions for making an atomic bomb, and photos of Ricardo showering in the nude that were never taken.
Not sure if the articles quoted that but in the paper they say that handful services exists to insert data. Doesn't rule out sabotage or give any answers to the actual who but makes it seem like this possibility was actutally rather well known and carelessly ignored by the developers.
Well, yeah, technically it surely won't but it migth have a meaning when some human (judge?) has to decide how reasonable it is to interpret some given data in a certain way. My comment was mostly aimed at the brain analogy as some posters seemed argue that getting the data in question would need some creative interpretation, cherry picking or even bad faith.