ag-solo problem is more backups than powerful objects

[dckc]

The core issue that prompted development of the on-chain smart wallet was really backups:

• Ag Solo wallet recovery plan Agoric/agoric-sdk#2629

The market norm is: if you have your 24 words, you can walk up to any computer and start doing business. But with ag-solo, you need the state of all your vats. If your machine crashes and you don't have a backup of your client-side wallet vat, poof! There went your assets. (well, not completely... recovering the vat state isn't as hard as cracking private keys, but it would involve a huge forensics effort.) So we moved the state of the wallet from the client machine on to the blockchain.

Aside: the initial prototype of the smart wallet was a nifty demonstration of the overall distributed object framework: We just changed where the wallet vat was deployed from the client side to on-chain, without changing the code inside the vat at all. I'm pretty sure @michaelfig did it, but I can't find it. Michael? Help?

So this point in the lecture doesn't seem like right thing to emphasize:

agoric-lecture-content/lectureNine/lectureNine.md

Line 68 in 2b33810

* We should not expose objects that powerful to normal users

It comes up at about 19:50 in the recording.

The overall security properties of ag-solo are pretty good. The home object only has capabilities that, in due course, we do want users to have.

There are some security issues that postponing ag-solo access allows us to postpone for the short/medium term:

• constrain mailbox to devnet config, to protect against c-list/liveslots DoS attacks Agoric/agoric-sdk#5965
• separate E(zoe).startInstance() authority from E(zoe).offer() Agoric/agoric-sdk#3725
• separate E(zoe).install() authority from E(zoe).offer() Agoric/agoric-sdk#4395

But by mainnet 3, we do want E(home.zoe).install(...) and E(home.zoe).startInstance(...) (or something equivalent) to be permissionless.

cc @jeetraut @hielo777

[michaelfig]

I think this one is an earlier duplicate of #4. Would you mind closing it @dckc?

[dckc]

strange! I wonder how that happened.