More moneromooo work on monero

Hi,

After a hiatus, I'm back for more monero work.

This will be part time again, and with a main goal of working on mitigations for various attempts at abusing the network (which I've started working on already in the last couple weeks or so) including PoW on connect. Possibly also helping sarang plug his implementation of Bulletproofs++ into Monero consensus, if he does not do it himself. And the usual bits and bobs as always.

Here's the link to my previous CCS: !103 (merged)

With the usual rate of $30 + 0.2 monero per hour, and monero at $130 currently, we get 225 monero for three months (which will be more than three calendar months, since part time, how much more depends on how I divide my time between monero and other things). As before, I'll post monthly updates regardless of how much time I actually spent on Monero that month.

Thanks

Down to contribute!

merged

mentioned in commit f59e0454

End of month update: I've worked about full time so far, 162 hours as of the end of 1/1/2021, with the following main points:

• various fixes and improvements to behave better against abuse
• optional DNS based block list
• plugging sarang's bulletproofs+ implementation into monero consensus
• full txpool revalidation on consensus version change
• batch tx verification when not in sync mode

This month's update:

• more work on abuse mitigation
• fix anchor peers (not actually PRed, I'm just noticing, I'll do that soon)
• fix serialization bug on mac (affects cold signing between mac and non mac)

Not much done this month, and I'm at about 235 hours so far, out of 520

This month's update:

Mostly work on plugging Triptych to Monero, which is turning out to be a more involved proposition than first thought, mostly due to the key image change.

290 hours so far.

This month's update:

More work on Triptych (now finished). Missing multisig though, which will require MRL work.

Otherwise, nothing big, just the usual set of smaller fixes and improvements, among which:

• speedup print_tx_coinbase_sum
• in place log sanitization
• fix monerod not starting on armel debian (likely, the reported never confirmed)
• fix generating from keys via RPC not setting seed language

336 hours so far.

This month's update:

• speedup popping blocks (relating to long term median)
• send confirmations in get_transactions result
• Articmine's fee changes (WIP)

350 hours so far.

This month's update:

• remove blocked addresses/hosts from peerlist
• chunk get_outs.bin calls to avoid sanity limits
• ArticMine's fee changes

366 hours so far.

Slow going (sorry). Since last time:

• work on embedding encrypted data in bulletproofs [1]
• some more work on ArticMine's fee changes (ready now)

397 hours so far

[1] this actually ended up badly since it turns out the recipient is unable to decrypt it without info that leaks the index of the real spend, which we do not want - however, triptych will be able to embed 31 bytes this way without this drawback; moreover bulletproofs can still embed this data for retrieval by the sender only, since they already know the real spend

And at long last I have eventually reached 520 hours. I apologize for the time it has taken. I burnt out a while ago and while I have recovered to some extent, it is hard to work on Monero again. The last bit of work I did in Monero to push me past the pledged 520 hours was investigation and mitigation of what looks to be a spam attack sending plenty of duplicate transactions in notifications through Tor.

I will not be opening a new CCS, and for the foreseeable future I'll be working on Townforge instead, my game-on-a-chain which is a Monero fork. I find motivation a lot easier working on this, and some things I do there may be backportable from time to time. Moreover, I'll probably still PR some bits and bobs from time to time.

Thanks