Vulnerability in hash to curve function

[kewde]

Writeup:
https://kewde.github.io/urs

I do no know if the same testcase is applicable to this repository.

[meling]

I wrote this code years ago but haven’t found the time to review these concerns, although I communicated them to Haibin who is the author of the paper on which it is based. I guess my question is if this code is being used by others?

We had plans to use it, but the project stalled.

[Giszmo]

This vulnerability is known since more than 7 years, yet the strong claims in the Readme were never amended? Given @kewde showed how to de-anonymize, there should be no doubt about this issue being fatal for the project.

At least this repo has an open issue tracker as opposed to https://github.com/monero-project/urs

[meling]

What is your preferred response @Giszmo ? I’m happy to take this repo offline, as I don’t have time or interest in maintaining it. I added a note on the readme. Maybe that will help warn potential users of the other project that forked mine…

[Giszmo]

The updated Readme is perfect. Taking down the repo would do more harm as people would fall for the forks that don't acknowledge the issue.

For non-cryptographers, which JS library could we use instead for our ring-signature needs?

[meling]

Sorry, I'm not aware of any JS libraries, or other Go libraries for that matter.

[Giszmo]

Good news. https://github.com/monero-project/urs disappeared. I'd appreciate if you left your project up for posterity. I'm not sure if they took their project private or if they removed it but I made a PR, something a project cannot prevent, suggesting the same changes to their Readme as you did to yours.