I believe it's viewed as unsafe in Bitcoin because of the way transactions are signed. Is this also true for Ether addresses?
[Ethereum] Is it safe to reuse Ether addresses
addressesbitcoincryptographySecuritysignature
addressesbitcoincryptographySecuritysignature
I believe it's viewed as unsafe in Bitcoin because of the way transactions are signed. Is this also true for Ether addresses?
Best Answer
Currently, Ethereum uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA), the same as Bitcoin. So whatever "unsafe" concerns there are with how Bitcoin transactions are signed, would be the same with Ethereum currently.
In Bitcoin and Ethereum, sending from an address will reveal the public key easily. Quantum computers compromise ECDSA and would make it easy to deduce the private key from the public key: this is usually the concern about revealing the public key. Lamport signatures are believed to be quantum resistant.
Update May 2019: Account abstraction described below has not been implemented due to complexity, and is planned as part of sharding.
Future release of Ethereum, will have Abstraction of transaction origin and signature:
Accounts will be able to specify their own scheme for validating transactions. This opens the door for Lamport signatures (or other algorithms desired by the user) which improves security against quantum computers in Ethereum.