To fix a minor malleability found by Sergio Lerner (reported here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8392.msg1245898#msg1245898)
The problem is that if (R,S) is a valid ECDSA signature for a given
message and public key, (R,-S) is also valid. Modulo N (the order
of the secp256k1 curve), this means that both (R,S) and (R,N-S) are
valid. Given that N is odd, S and N-S have a different lowest bit.
We solve the problem by forcing signatures to have an even S value,
excluding one of the alternatives.
This commit just changes the signing code to always produce even S
values, and adds a verification mode to check it. This code is not
enabled anywhere yet. Existing tests in key_tests.cpp verify that
the produced signatures are still valid.
The key refactor changed the way unencrypted private keys with compressed
public key are stored in the wallet. Apparently older versions relied on
this to verify the correctness of stored keys.
Note that earlier pre-release versions do risk creating wallets that can
not be opened by 0.8.3 and earlier.
Special serializers for script which detect common cases and encode
them much more efficiently. 3 special cases are defined:
* Pay to pubkey hash (encoded as 21 bytes)
* Pay to script hash (encoded as 21 bytes)
* Pay to pubkey starting with 0x02, 0x03 or 0x04 (encoded as 33 bytes)
Other scripts up to 121 bytes require 1 byte + script length. Above
that, scripts up to 16505 bytes require 2 bytes + script length.
Corrupt wallets used to cause a DB_RUNRECOVERY uncaught exception and a
crash. This commit does three things:
1) Runs a BDB verify early in the startup process, and if there is a
low-level problem with the database:
+ Moves the bad wallet.dat to wallet.timestamp.bak
+ Runs a 'salvage' operation to get key/value pairs, and
writes them to a new wallet.dat
+ Continues with startup.
2) Much more tolerant of serialization errors. All errors in deserialization
are reported by tolerated EXCEPT for errors related to reading keypairs
or master key records-- those are reported and then shut down, so the user
can get help (or recover from a backup).
3) Adds a new -salvagewallet option, which:
+ Moves the wallet.dat to wallet.timestamp.bak
+ extracts ONLY keypairs and master keys into a new wallet.dat
+ soft-sets -rescan, to recreate transaction history
This was tested by randomly corrupting testnet wallets using a little
python script I wrote (https://gist.github.com/3812689)
More than doubles the speed of verifying already-cached signatures
that use compressed pubkeys:
Before: ~200 microseconds
After: ~80 microseconds
(no caching at all: ~3,300 microseconds per signature)
Also encapsulates the signature cache code in a class
and fixes a signed/unsigned comparison warning.
Create a maximum-10MB signature verification result cache.
This should almost double the number of transactions that
can be processed on a given CPU, because before this change
ECDSA signatures were verified when transactions were added
to the memory pool and then again when they appeared in
a block.
Pieter Wuille