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spurrious test failures in "safety" checking

Open cyphar opened this issue 2 years ago • 0 comments

I've run into two cases of failures in safety-checking code, leading me to wonder whether the logic is sound.

  • The sanity check in Dealer::shard that checks whether the evaluated polynomial equals x failed once with thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'assertion failed: self.threshold == 1 || y != poly.constant()', pkg/paperback-core/src/shamir/dealer.rs:111:17. I guess it is possible for the polynomial to equal the secret at a random x value, but we still should avoid allowing that even if an attacker couldn't know whether that was the case. Maybe we should handle it better? Dealer::next_shard should probably re-try at a different x value rather than crashing the program.
  • In CI, the test for limited_recover_fail failed because it seems one of the polynomials returned the same value for a random x value. thread 'shamir::dealer::test::limited_recover_fail' panicked at '[quickcheck] TEST FAILED. Arguments: (9, [30], [GfElem(4011157905), GfElem(1345881083)])', /home/runner/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/quickcheck-1.0.3/src/tester.rs:165:28

Maybe we need to reconsider if these properties are actually guaranteed or just very unlikely to happen (probably the latter) and how we should protect against them without using asserts.

cyphar avatar Sep 23 '23 03:09 cyphar